MADE YOUR WAY
As with so many other industries, technology has changed furniture production. On the front end, digital tools and apps allow companies to reach consumers, no showrooms required, and provide real-time visualizations of what custom pieces will look like. Interior Define even offers an augmented reality smartphone app that inserts the prospective piece into an image of your living room.
Behind the scenes, the companies hold essentially no inventory and rely on computer-controlled machines to do much of the work. At Inside Weather, a sofa is merely raw lumber until a customer places an order. When this is done, a CNC machine cuts the necessary wood components at the company’s facility in Rancho Cordova, California. When someone orders a credenza, a flatbed digital printer applies patterns to panels.
“Frankly, we couldn’t have done this at all 15 years ago,” Parsa said, “and it would have been significantly more cost prohibitive even five years ago.”
It’s a similar story at Skyline Furniture, a manufacturing company outside Chicago that was founded in 1946 and offers quick, custom-made furniture produced through recently acquired equipment.
Skyline’s digital textile printer turns out upholstery fabric on demand. “Previous to that, if you wanted to do a custom textile, it took 90 days, and you had to buy a minimum of 2,000 to 3,000 yards,” said Meganne Wecker, the company’s president.
Now Skyline can print just enough fabric to cover a single chair, in any pattern. The company manufactures many pieces for other retailers, including The Inside, but also has its own consumer-facing brand, Cloth & Co.
In a recent partnership with One Kings Lane, Cloth & Co. created Palette, an online service that allows shoppers to play with the color and scale of their patterns, even changing elements within them.
Online furniture customization “is a challenge to a company like West Elm or Ikea, which does carry a lot of inventory,” said Patricia Johnson, the graduate program director for furniture design at Rhode Island School of Design. “It gives a populist element to design — it’s more democratic — which I think is never a bad thing.”
Less appealing, however, is that many of the pieces offered by new online companies venture into knockoffs.
“A lot of them are derivative or copies of things,” Johnson said.
Inside Weather’s Vita lounge chair ($473) looks almost exactly like the Shell Chair ($3,865) designed by Hans Wegner for Carl Hansen & Son in 1963.
But imitation is hardly a deterrent, certainly not at these prices.