Furniture & Home Goods

Belmont Home Decor Chicago

Throw pillows, bedding, table runners and other home decorating items are a staple of this company’s factory on Belmont.

Longshadow Pomona Township

Daniel and Charlotte Ward taught themselves how to make dry cast limestone garden ornaments using crumbling 100-year American designs as inspiration.

MainFraiM Rockford

Woodworker Jeremy Klonicki and crew make furniture, frames, and sculpture with salvaged bits of machinery, wood, old buildings and pipe-organ parts.

MegMade Chicago

Meg Piercy and her husband, Joe, painted and repurposed a dresser given to them by a neighbor into a changing table when their first son was born. Friends asked them to do similar work, and their business was born.

Rocking Bird Chicago

Co-owner/designer Chelsea Coolsaet is known for crafting cutting boards, pens, planters and tables, often out of walnut. The problem? She hears some customers say, “This wood is so beautiful, I’m never going to use it.”

Sangamon Reclaimed Springfield

A collective of local veterans and firefighters dismantles barns in Sangamon County and turns the wood into new works of furniture and art.

Simply Amish Arcola

In 1979, Kevin Kauffman and his uncle John Mast started a company in Illinois’ Amish country that links an entire network of traditional Amish furniture workshops with a modern distribution system.

Solo Cup Company Lake Forest

Leo Hulseman founded Solo in 1936. His son Robert, came up with the now-ubiquitous red Solo cup in the 1970s. The company was purchased by Dart Container in 2012, but the party cups are still made in Urbana, and Solo’s corporate offices remain in Lake Forest.

Well Made Chicago

The Chicago-based industrial design studio creating housewares and framing began as a Kickstarter. Five years later, the company’s revenue is more than 20 times its initial Kickstarter funding.