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It’s Not Just Wayfair: Why Does ALL Of Your Furniture Fall Apart?
Interesting commentary on what happened to the furniture industry in the United States.
It’s Not Just Wayfair: Why Does ALL Of Your Furniture Fall Apart?
Interesting commentary on what happened to the furniture industry in the United States.
The United States still has a furniture industry?
There are still workshops putting out high quality pieces for custom orders.
South Carolina, Pennsylvania and Ohio are the centers of US furniture making.
Yes, but it’s expensive.
It’s odd because from what I can gather from things like youtube it seems like woodworking is huge there (and they say wood is cheap there too), so I’d imagine there should be a considerable amount of people doing furniture.
Contrasting to the situation here where people doing hand-maded furniture is lowering their prices so much trying to keep up with the ikea-type of shit (and of course doing things with superior quality).
Labor is still expensive.
Lots of labor needed if it’s not mass produced on an assembly line.
My FiL made my dining room table. It’s ~600lbs and was $2K in material alone, that didn’t include any labor he didn’t charge us. It’s just about indestructible but it certainly would’ve been $4k-$5k if he was selling it. Would you buy that? I thought not. I certainly wouldn’t have.
I made my sons’ crib. Solid cherry, nothing crazy fancy but I like it. I wouldn’t make another to sell unless I get at least $5k for it. I doubt anyone would buy it for much more than $1k. Just not worth it.
Sounds like your FIL made my dining table 😄
Yeah. Only thing is, the “affordable” American made stuff largely consists of crap quality. I made the mistake of insisting on American made stuff when I also didn’t have the budget for premium furniture. I ended up with crappy seating that started breaking in less than a year. The stitching started coming apart in the second year. And by the third year the “genuine” leather was separating and flaking.