Somewhere between a dialysis lab in New Hampshire and a spine device inspection line in Massachusetts, a quality assurance technician started noticing something that had nothing to do with furniture at all: how much of the built environment, and the products that fill it, were made without much thought for the planet or the people living in it. That noticing eventually became a company.
Josh Flibotte is the Chief Executive Officer and President of Commercial Office Interiors LLC, known as COI, a role he has held since November 2022 from the company’s base in New Hampshire. He describes COI as a Software-First furniture dealer with a specific mission: to optimize the furniture buying process in a sustainable way, using biophilic design and low VOC materials to combat what he frames, directly, as a mental health crisis, while responsibly sourcing raw materials and reducing carbon emissions across the process.
A Career That Started in Quality Control
Josh’s early career reads nothing like a furniture executive’s. From October 2011 to April 2014, he worked as a Quality Assurance Quality Inspector at SpineFrontier, a medical device company, a role he later described on his own record with a wry, one-line label: “Diabetic Things!!!”
From May 2014 to April 2015, he moved to DEKA Research and Development as a Quality Assurance Test Technician, a job he tagged, in his own words, “Peri Dialysis Things!!!” He stayed at DEKA for a total of two years and eight months, moving next into an EVT Tech and QA Software Engineer role from April to November 2015, which he called “Tricky Things !!!”, and finishing as a QA and Manufacturing Associate from November 2015 to December 2016, summarized simply as “QA, MFG, Cal, Doc, Eng Things!!!”
That habit, of describing serious technical work with a wink rather than a boast, has stayed with him. It shows up again in how he frames leadership itself.
Six Years Learning the Furniture Business at NewVo
In December 2016, Josh moved into the furniture and interiors industry as Chief Operations Officer of NewVo Interiors in New Hampshire, a post he held for six years, until November 2022. While there, he was connected to NewVo Custom, a division of NewVo Interiors, to Jack the Liquidator, a move management operation, and to Office Zilla, where he served as a franchisee managing member handling office needs for clients.
Those six years appear to have functioned as a hands-on education in every corner of the furniture and workplace services business, from custom manufacturing to the unglamorous logistics of moving a company out of one space and into another.
Founding Commercial Office Interiors
In November 2022, Josh became Chief Executive Officer of Commercial Office Interiors LLC, co-founding the company with Joe Aiello, and the company they have built since reflects the values he had apparently been forming since his DEKA and SpineFrontier years. COI positions itself as the preferred dealer for Artopex, a sustainable furniture manufacturer, and for Reseat, a platform focused on asset management, the secondary furniture market, and Scope 3 emissions reporting. Its client base spans end users such as corporations and small and mid-sized businesses, facilities management professionals, owner’s project managers, and both architects and interior designers working in the commercial space.
A Mission Framed Around Health and Climate
What distinguishes Josh’s framing of COI from a standard furniture dealership pitch is how directly he connects the physical product to human wellbeing. He has described the company’s goal as using the power of nature, through biophilic design and low-VOC furniture, to help address the mental health crisis, while responsibly sourcing raw materials in a way that reduces CO2 emissions.
It is an ambitious linkage, from indoor air quality and natural materials to psychological health and climate impact, but it is the linkage he has chosen to build a company around, and it runs through every partnership COI has struck, from Artopex’s sustainable manufacturing to Reseat’s emissions reporting tools.
Leadership, in His Own Words
Josh has summarized his own philosophy on leadership in a single, characteristically understated line: “Being in charge only means you work for more people. Be the leader you’d follow.” It is a philosophy that seems to trace back to those early years spent on inspection lines and QA benches, watching what leadership looked like from below before he ever held the title himself.
Throughout his career, by his own account, he has maintained the highest level of performance standards across quality and medical facility functions and sales guidance, building brands and businesses through what he calls a results-driven mentality aimed, ultimately, at client satisfaction.
Who COI Is Built to Serve
COI’s client list is worth reading closely, because it reveals a dealer that has built itself around the entire ecosystem of a commercial building project rather than a single buyer. End users, the corporations and small and mid-sized businesses actually occupying the space, sit alongside facilities management professionals who will maintain it for years after the sale closes.
Owner’s project managers, the people tasked with keeping a build on schedule and on budget, are named specifically, as are the commercial architects and interior designers who design the space before a single piece of furniture ever arrives. A dealer that tries to serve all five of those constituencies at once is, in effect, promising to speak several different professional languages fluently, a harder proposition than it sounds, and one that only works if the underlying product, sustainably sourced, software supported, and biophilically designed, holds up under each of those different sets of expectations.
A New Hampshire Company With a National Ambition
Nearly four years into leading COI, Josh is running a company that sits at the intersection of two conversations shaping the commercial interiors industry in 2026: the technology-driven reinvention of how commercial furniture gets bought and sold, and the growing expectation that workplace design accounts for its impact on both the people who use it and the planet that supplies it.
For a leader who started his career labeling his own job descriptions with exclamation points, the throughline to a mission statement about sustainable sourcing and mental health is not as strange as it might first appear. Both are, in their own way, an argument that the details most people overlook are exactly the ones worth taking seriously.
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