The Journey Continues (Pt. 12) - Ramping Up Again

Having experienced the severity of the economic recession of the early 1990s I had surprisingly mixed feelings about the surge of new work coming in from places like Brueton. Although one part of me was thankful to be busy once more, there was another part of me that dreaded the thought of ramping back up to warp speed again.

When we were at our busiest in the 1980s I was constantly working long hours, including evenings and weekends. This made it difficult to do simple things, such as spend time with my young family. Although it was tough to decelerate the business as orders dried up, it was also a welcome relief in some ways because I was simply burned out.

During these down times I began to sketch out all kinds of ideas of furniture concepts I wanted to have made. This became a surprisingly enjoyable exercise and it had an almost meditative quality for me. Deep down I loved the creativity of it all - conceiving ideas; sketching them out; then figuring out how to go about making them into reality. The latter part was easy because the science of making was something I had down to a fine art already - after years of taking other people's ideas and transforming them into finished product.

The first prototype I ended up taking from sketchbook to bench was a Biedermeier style desk - very similar to the Rainforest Desk shown below.
An old bundle of Myrtle Burl veneer that had been stored away for years was used to make the inset of the top, while offcuts of Macassar Ebony were utilized to make the apron, legs and plinths. Not long after the desk was completed I was fortunate to have it sold - to an author who was looking for an inspiration place where he could write his books.

The success and sale of this first piece - especially one that was wholly of my own creation - actually inspired me to consider scaling my shop down even smaller, to focus exclusively on making and selling my own designs. This fantasy, however, was short-lived because the economic reality of the situation had its own facts and figures.

For one thing I was now the father of 3 young children, and as much as it might be righteous and honourable to pursue the path of the starving artist - also starving one's family in the process was not a viable option.

In addition, despite how cool I thought my furniture pieces were, the marketplace as a whole was not sharing my enthusiasm. Aside from the initial desk sale, three consecutive years of displaying at IIDEX did virtually nothing to stimulate any interest in my designs although, to be fair, the recession going on at the time wasn't conducive for sales either.

Around 1992 or 1993 there was also a Call for Entry for furniture designs to be submitted for an upcoming book entitled "Conservation by Design". This was a collaborative effort by W.A.R.P. (Woodworkers' Alliance for Rainforest Protection) and the furniture design program at RISD (Rhode Island School of Design) to select tangible examples of sustainable furniture designs. I was thrilled beyond belief at this opportunity to be published, and felt certain that my Rainforest Desk would be one of the pieces selected.

Sadly, of the 76 furniture makers accepted for publication, I wasn't one of them.

About a year later there was another Call for Entry - and another rejection - once again from RISD. This time it was my "Tower of Power" that bit the proverbial dust.


It was shortly after we started ramping up with Brueton that I had a lengthy discussion with J. Wade Beam on what my business focus should be. Wade advised me to abandon my efforts to develop my own pieces and focus, instead, on being an OEM supplier to companies like Brueton. At the time this seemed like sage advice, for a couple of reasons.

First, given the rejections I was getting it seemed obvious that my furniture pieces weren't resonating with the more knowledgeable design academics of the world. Second, thanks to the recession there was now a seismic shift under way in the way in which companies had their pieces made. Making things in-house was now falling out of vogue as more and more designers began to outsource rather than invest in their own production. (Of course, taken to its extreme this ultimately led to the almost complete offshoring of production that we now see today).

As the 1990s wore on our base of OEM clients expanded to include not only Brueton but also Vladimir Kagan, Rick Shaver, Monroe Sherman (Sherman Designs), and Lee Weitzman. To keep up with the growing influx of work we were soon compelled to expand the size of our staff.

Although I was never keen on having large numbers of people working for me, in many ways I had little choice if I was going to keep my customers happy.

But it was only after I hired a "Jesus woodworker" that I decided to go CNC.

How I Became Green - Thanks to Captain Planet

In the 1980s there was a small but growing awareness of environmental issues in the world, thanks largely to groups such as Greenpeace with media campaigns that spoke of clearcutting in the Amazon rainforest. While I was basically aware of what was going on down there I didn't pay it much heed because, frankly, there seemed to be very little I could do about it.

At the time we were buying wood from a fellow named Andrew Poynter of A&M Wood Specialty. Andrew imported exotic woods for custom woodworkers such as myself, and although our volume of wood use was small we did know we were playing some kind of a role in the problem.

In tandem with fellow pioneers such as Scott Landis of the Woodworkers' Alliance for Rainforest Protection (W.A.R.P.) Andrew ended playing an instrumental role in educating woodworkers such as myself on what the problem was, in the hope of finding a solution.

The dialogues and grassroots efforts of groups such as Greenpeace, The Sierra Club, World Wildlife Fund and W.A.R.P. inevitably led to recognition of the need for standards development which, in turn, resulted in the creation of the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) in 1993.

But in the interim, and until FSC got off the ground, several rudimentary efforts were made to protect the Amazon. One of these initiatives was the "Guardian of the Amazon" program -sponsored by World Wildlife Fund. The gist of this effort was that with every purchase of wood made you would "adopt" an acre of tropical rainforest in order to protect it from clearcutting. In practical terms, support of this program was one of our first "green" initiatives as custom furniture makers. But our support at the time was a proverbial drop in the bucket at best, given the relative low volumes of wood we were actually purchasing.

The thing that really catalyzed my involvement with forest sustainability took place later in 1991, when my oldest son was about 4 years old. He was watching a television show called "Captain Planet", and in this one particular episode the team of environmental superheroes ended up fighting a bad guy who was destroying the rainforest with a giant machine - in order to make furniture.

Since my son knew I made furniture for a living he wondered if maybe I, too, was a bad guy.

Visibly upset, he asked me point blank if the furniture I was making was also destroying the rainforest.

That became without question a moment of truth for me, because in my desire to answer him as honestly as possible I came to realize that I really didn't know all that much about the wood I was using, or where it was coming really from.

This was the initial seed to be planted that later manifested for me as a passion for sustainability.

It wasn't until 1996 that the seed really took root with the felling of K'iid K'iyaas on Haida Gwaii.

The Journey Continues (Pt.8) - Rapid Deceleration

The end of our working relationship with Richard Mark in 1989 impacted our shop immediately, although for a while the decline in work volume was partly offset by new orders coming in from Dakota Jackson and Ron Seff in New York, and a showroom called Carriage House in Miami.

We also had a scattering of custom work from interior designers in the Toronto area, which I tried to augument through participation in the IIDEX shows of 1989, 1990 and 1991. But for a variety of reasons it didn't really matter what I tried to do to bring in more work - our order book kept shrinking during this time.

There were a variety of reasons for this - many of which were out of my hands. First, there was the Savings & Loans crisis in the United States which was having a crippling effect on financial markets. There was also the Gulf War from 1990-1991 which caused oil prices to spike up, and overall consumer spending to pull back. On a technical level the economy was in a severe recession between mid 1990 to mid 1991, and in this environment discretionary spending of any kind - including custom furniture - was a low priority.

Compounding this were some additional shocks. By 1991 both Karl Springer and Ron Seff had passed away. In the case of Springer his iconic furniture business collapsed almost immediately. When Karl's former partner Ron Seff passed away, Ron's company was transferred to new ownership - and our business relationship effectively ended there.

Dakota Jackson seemed to have a considerable backlog to carry him through the slow times, but as his order book shrank he decided to keep more of his work in-house, rather than subcontract overflow to our shop as he had been doing. In addition, at this stage of his career Dakota had grown weary of doing one-off custom work. It was too restrictive for growth, and given his aspiration to become a large scale 20th Century industrialist, Dakota's design focus shifted to things like the Vik-ter Chair and Library seating which could be made and sold in multiples.

I was now scrambling to find other sources of work, and the Toronto IIDEX show became the focus of my efforts. In order to participate in shows such as IIDEX, it was necessary to show examples of what you were capable of doing. Given the OEM (private label) relationship we had with collections such as Dakota Jackson, it was not possible for us to show examples of Dakota's furniture under our own banner at a design show. It would be perceived as a knock-off.

On multiple levels this was OK with me, especially because for the first time this gave me the opportunity to design and build something entirely of my own creation.

My first piece was a custom desk inspired by a Biedermeier table I had seen some years earlier. The initial prototype was crafted out of a combination of Lacewood and Myrtle Burl, and there was an inlaid band set into the perimeter of the top. There were also three pencil drawers with concealed mitred corners discretely inset into the side of the floating top.

This desk was unveiled at the 1990 IIDEX show, and although the response from the design community was lukewarm (probably due to the slow economic climate) I did manage to find a buyer who absolutely fell in love with the piece. An author was looking for an inspirational desk from which he could write books, and in his mind what I had made was absolutely perfect.

I still remember clearly the immense satisfaction I felt at knowing how something I had first envisioned, then made, could resonate so positively with another human being.

A second incarnation of this desk (shown below) followed a year or so later, made of Macassar Ebony and Carpathian Elm Burl. Dubbed the Rainforest Desk, it ended up being auctioned off as part of a fund raising effort to support a group called W.A.R.P. (Woodworkers' Alliance for Rainforest Protection). That story will be told in a later post.


Also for the 1990 IIDEX show I designed and built an entertainment center called the "Tower of Power". This piece consisted of a tall cabinet made of flat cut cherry, and the cabinet interior was configured to house audio components behind a sandblasted glass door. For ventilation of components there was an Electrosonic whisper fan built in to the back of the cabinet. The television pedestal and door medallion were made of Curly English Sycamore inlaid into herringbone patterns. The plinth base and rotating platform for television were finished in high gloss ebonized anigre.

Although this cabinet did win a special award thanks to a revolutionary waterbased finish we developed, once again the response from the design community was tepid at best.

By 1992 things as a business were nearing rock bottom. Although the recession was technically over we were slower than we had ever been. Where we once employed a staff of 20, we were now hanging on with barely 5.


I was also now the father to three small children, and I was beginning to seriously question my abilities as a provider.


At this stage I was willing to take on just about anything.