Owners and designers talk about the difficulties of making furniture today Earlier this month, furniture company Greycork, a direct-to-consumer startup seeking to revolutionize the industry, announced that it was winding down operations, citing the challenges of making high-quality, affordable, and accessible furniture.
In his letter to customers, one of Greycork?s co-founders, John Humphrey, said the company just couldn?t figure out how to make pieces that offered "revolutionary quality at a revolutionary price."
Humphrey and his colleagues learned a tough lesson that all craftspeople and designers who decide to make and sell their own furniture eventually learn: The business can be brutal.
While the U.S. furniture market is worth $96.4 billion dollars annually, breaking even in a world filled with low-cost competitors, small margins, and changing trends (and a shifting retail marketplace) becomes quite difficult when you?re not a Big Box store, or a certain Swedish behemoth. What?s the reality of running a small furniture business in 2017" As a coda to Curbed?s Furniture Week, we asked seven designers and owners to discuss the realities and challenges of startup and small-scale furniture manufacturing.
Despite coming from different sectors of the industry?from a two-person startup focused on handcrafted furniture to a business-to-business firms focused on the commercial market?all the companies share similar stories of market pressures and the diff...