Author: Robin Harsch

Moving & Co-management: A team of experts to meet tomorrow’s challenges

Harsch is proud to announce the nomination of 3 Strategic Directors within our Moving Department: Jean-Sylvain Nicoud, Olivier Petit and Mathieu Anthoine, who took up their new positions on January 1, 2025.

These appointments were made with a view to anticipating market challenges and strengthening our ability to support our national and international development. Backed by their experience and expertise, Jean-Sylvain, Olivier and Mathieu will head up our activities and be responsible for the following areas:

Jean-Sylvain Nicoud: International Moving

Olivier Petit: Local and Office Moves

Mathieu Anthoine: Operational Moves

These three experts, who know the challenges and needs of our sector inside out, will take the reins of the department across all our sites, delegating operational decisions and continuing to steer the company’s growth, while enabling us to remain focused on strategic choices.

We are convinced that this organization will further enhance our agility, our ability to respond to future challenges and to sustain our success.

We wish them every success in their new responsibilities and in the exciting projects to come within the Removals department!

Jean-Sylvain NICOUD, Olivier Petit, Mathieu Anthoine

 

The weekend of September 1-3 was a beautiful, sunny one on the shores of the lake at Morges. And just as well, since the 14th edition of the LE LIVRE SUR LES QUAIS book festival took place on these shores. And this year, for the first time, Harsch was one of their partners.

 

A tempting program

 

With more than 180 authors, the festival welcomed not only distinguished guests from the world of French and foreign literature, but also new discoveries. In all, over 150 events were offered to the public, including readings, workshops, activities for young people and other surprises.

Chaired by Marie-Hélène Lafon, the literary salon welcomed a wide range of authors to Morges, including Marie Darrieussecq, Bruno Pellegrino, Chloé Delaume and Lionel Duroy, Silvia Ricci Lempen, Serge Joncour, Agnès Ledig, Luc Lang, Marie Laberge, Bernard Minier, Sylvain Prudhomme, Christine Ockrent, Ségolène Royal, André Ourednik, Amélie Nothomb, Daniel de Roulet and Metin Arditi and Ariane Chemin. It was also an opportunity to discover rare foreign authors such as Bernardine Evaristo, Sarah Hall and Gouzel Iakhina, not forgetting the delegation of Romanian writers who took part in numerous events for the first time.

 

 

Harsch and Le Livre sur les quais invent a new concept

 

With over 40,000 visitors, the festival was once again a great success. And all these people had to be able to sit quietly in the shade of an umbrella, perhaps with a book in their hands, provided by Le Livre sur les quais or by a visitor themselves. For the first year, and its first partnership with the festival, Harsch recycled its art transport crates to create “Caisses à lire”. The principle was simple: anyone could bring in books they wanted to donate, place them on their reading crates or under the benches built for the occasion, and help themselves to other books donated by other festival-goers or the festival itself.

 

 

The result: tranquillity, rest, reading in the shade, exchanges, conviviality… all positive points.

 

Even for kids

 

And it was during the construction of these benches and reading crates that one of the festival team members came up with a brilliant idea: why not make reading crates for children? The crates are turned upside down, shelves are created, a few cushions are put in place, and the youngest readers can slip into these crates, as if in a tree house, and discover new stories as thrilling as they are funny, terrifying as they are sad.

Recycling has become the norm these days, and there’s always something we no longer need that can be used by someone else or have a new purpose. We thank the festival and its team for these fruitful exchanges, and wish them all the best, and even better, for 2024!

And if you’ve got novels, short stories, comics, newspapers or encyclopedias to move, you know where to turn!

 

 

More about Le Livre sur Les Quais

Looking to move?

 

 

Finally back!!!

On Saturday 25 September, from 2pm to 2am, discover the joy of the Museums. 23 museums and institutions in Lausanne and Pully will be open for the great joy of young and old.

DISCOVER THE PROGRAMME

HARSCH, the art transport company based in Geneva and Lausanne, will have a stand on the Place de la Riponne. Come and visit us. We’ll be serving Pop-Corn, you can learn more about how to pack and protect paintings and sculptures during transport, and you can take part in a great cardboard box assembly competition, with the fastest winning some nice KDOs! So yes, smile and come to the museum night. And we’ll give you free tickets!

ASK US FOR FREE TICKETS

(fill in the email with your name and the number of tickets you want (max 4))

The Night of the Museums ticket gives you free travel on Lausanne’s transport system for zones 11 and 12 (Grand Lausanne). And each bus stop near one of the museums will be marked with a wooden transport box made by HARSCH and a white Night of the Museums flag.

Please note that access to the event is only possible on presentation of a valid COVID certificate according to the rules in force issued by the OFSP.

The Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, the Graduate Institute Geneva, has opened the doors of its new residence for students in the heart of Geneva’s international sector:  The Grand Morillon Student Residence. Designed by Japanese architect Kengo Kuma, it will provide accommodation for several hundred students. The two         nine-storey buildings comprise 678 beds and a series of shared open areas, such as kitchens, a small auditorium, a study room, meeting rooms, a fitness and on the top floor a large polyvalent room opening onto a panoramic terrace with a view of the lake and of Mont Blanc.

 

The company of furniture removers, Harsch, is very proud to have been chosen to organize the gigantic equipment of the installation.

 

Watch the film here

 

In a mere fortnight, and moreover, during the Christmas and New Year holidays, we were able to equip the 678 bedrooms in the residence. From coffee spoons to kettles, from bedside lamps to beds, the specialists in our depots assembled more than 800 sets of furniture and accessories. And to make things even more complicated, this enormous residence includes four types of bedroom, ranging from studios to large bedrooms for three people. This meant that there were four different types of sets to prepare, depending on the category of the bedroom.

 

This herculean job consisted of setting up the furniture, shuttling back and forth between our depots and the buildings of the residence, dispatching each set to the correct bedroom, fitting all of them out, and finally scanning each accessory in order to create a computerized inventory.  This latter, carried out with the SolAsset software edited by SOLID S.A., will enable the facility management department to have access in real time to the complete inventory of the Grand Morillon Student Residence and to supervise the localization of the accessories, the stock and maintenance.

 

Our solid experience in office relocation and asset management has enabled us to carry out everything in optimal conditions and without delay. There is no doubt that the students will feel perfectly at home there!

 

 

On Friday, January 10, 2020 a number of managers from our company gathered together in a room at the EPFL+ECAL Lab, a design research and innovation centre of the EPFL/Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne, located in the ECAL/University of Art and Design Lausanne building. The collaboration between these two schools aims to combine artistic creativity, in particular design, with scientific knowledge in order to transform technological innovations into practical applications for the user.

This laboratory’s strength is that it works closely with SMEs so that projects are not simply experiments without a future. It is also and primarily about being at the heart of users’ needs. Who better to guide these young artists and engineers than companies that offer services to an ever more demanding clientele?

In 2019,EPFL’s SME unit organised a competition for companies to help them reflect on the models of innovation they could put in place in their field of activity. Harsch was selected on the basis of an application developing our perspective on business innovation, the areas we wanted to develop and our ongoing projects.

The prize for this competition was this day of ideation between our company and part of the team at EPFL+ECAL Lab, so skillfully led by Nicolas Henchoz. We had the opportunity to spend a day of creativity and innovation on a theme dear to us, facilitated by a dynamic and engaging team. After an overview of the various projects carried out by the laboratory and a visit to their premises, we were able to tackle our desires for innovation through different workshops.

Our removal people will not have an exoskeleton overnight to make carrying loads less arduous. Nor in the immediate future will our clients be able to pre-visualize their future home with their furniture in place prior to their move. But this day enabled us to project ourselves into tomorrow’s world and to come up with accessible and concrete ideas. And that’s very fitting since Harsch is The Art of Moving Forward. And who knows, in the near future, we may offer you even more innovative solutions to make moving home easier.