We take pride in every piece of furniture we provide our customers. We embrace lean manufacturing, where we strive to cut unnecessary overhead costs by making our manufacturing process as efficient as possible. We include all our employees in the process by having quality meetings every morning where everyone comes up with a 2 second improvement that helps save time and money. Over time we have been able to see tremendous benefits: employees feel more valued, manufacturing process is more efficient, and we are able to provide better service and products to our customers.
Sourcing
We work with lumber providers that source wood from Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana and a bit in Michigan. Our desire is to use only the best and therefore work to ensure we are using quality wood. For example, our cherry wood comes from the eastern states, where they are known for better quality cherry. Also, we use Select Cherry, which offers minimal knots, pits and sap wood, giving our customers a better-quality product.
Prepping
How the wood is prepped before manufacturing plays a significant role in the quality of the piece when it is built. Every piece of wood is kiln dried to a certain percentage, stored in a humidity-controlled building, and then glued together to form planks that are used to build the furniture.
Controlling humidity is important because wood expands and contracts with the humidity level. If humidity is too low, when a piece adjusts to your home it can result in cracking.* It can also affect the smoothness of the wood by causing a ripple effect in the finish.
As orders are placed the necessary parts are pulled, grouped together, labeled with the order number, and placed in the que until it is ready to be built. This helps cut down time it would take the builder to track down the necessary parts as well as ensures that we have everything ready to build the order.
*This is subject to your house also staying within a proper humidity range of 30%-35%.
Building
To give our customer more value in each product we offer, we strive be to more efficient in our manufacturing process, without sacrificing quality. As most manufacturing companies adopt an assembly line approach, we embrace a cell-based manufacturing approach. The difference is in an assembly line one person does a task in the process repeatedly, whereas in a cell-based model the job of assembling and sanding an entire piece will be with one person. This cut down on the repetitiveness of the job, helping to create higher job satisfaction with our employees.
Finishing
After a piece is assembled and sanded it is sent to our finishing facility. We take extra care at this stage to ensure that each piece looks and feels great:
- The stain is applied, given time to absorb, and then the excess is wiped away. It is inspected so that any issues can be fixed before it is sealed.
- Once the stain is dry, a seal coat is applied to help protect the wood and “lock” in the color of the stain. When it’s dry, which is usually about 30 minutes, the piece is lightly sanded and wiped to remove any bumps or dirt.
- The topcoat is then applied and left to dry for 8-12 hours before it is sent to shipping. It is important to note that a finish will take approximately 30 days to fully cure and 100% durable** which means that all items should be lightly used if delivered within those first 30 days.
**There is no topcoat that is impervious to normal wear and tear. Softer woods, such as Cherry are more prone to denting.
Assembling
After finishing every piece goes through a final quality inspection, where the overall finish is once again inspected as well as hardware, doors and drawers are installed to ensure that everything is in perfect working order.
Shipping
After each piece passes quality inspection where it is checked for color, defects and overall quality, each piece is wrapped, packaged and boxed. A state of the art box machine lets us produce boxes on demand that fit each item individually, which drastically cuts down on damage. We believe that packaging is as important as constructing the item itself and proper care should be taken to deliver a premium item to the end consumer.