JOIN USThe key to profitable furniture is replication. Scott McGlasson has learnt
this lesson over time, even as he tries to carve some exquisite chairs, learns Michael Tortorello.
What is the value of a dining-room chair? You can’t eat it. And you can sit on the floor free, as millions of people do. A chair is a luxury. But then what would be the right term to describe the real worth of a dining chair that sells for $1,600? An
extravagance? An obscenity? How about a pretty good deal?
Furniture maker Scott McGlasson, 48, professed a couple of goals last week when he set out to design a new chair in his shop, called Woodsport. He wanted a prototype that he could display in his booth at the Architectural Digest Home Design Show, which runs March 19 to 22 in Manhattan. And he wanted to create a piece that could match his easy chair ($3,200) and chaise longue ($8,900). He calls this furniture line “RB,” for the running bond of two-inch-wide wood tiles that cover the seats like brickwork.
At the moment, the black walnut tiles were all Scott had – that and a pencil sketch on a piece of quarter-inch hardboard. A few days ago, he was laying out his high-tech design kit: a free pencil from Youngblood Lumber, a four-foot-long straight edge, a Starrett square, a bevel, a punched metal disc and a Pink Pearl eraser. The eraser was getting the heaviest use. He hadn’t liked the hardboard template when he first drew it four months ago. And it hadn’t improved through desuetude.
Ideally, when the chair was completed, it would be well proportioned, impeccably finished and sustainably sourced. It would express Scott’s personal vision as a craftsman. Practically, the piece needed to be something he could build with about $200 to $300 worth of materials. And while the test model could take 40 hours to assemble, he would budget just half that time for the production version. (The chaise longue, by comparison, consumed 120 hours.)
Scott also obeyed an overarching imperative: The chair needed to make a profit, and a decent one at that. “I get hassled on price sometimes,” he said. “Some people will say, 'Really, isn’t that a little much?' And I’m like, 'What do you make?' I’m sure my hourly rate is a lot lower than theirs.” Scott estimates that his hourly rate is $85. But Woodsport is a one-man studio (at least until he hires a new assistant). This means that he spends hours of every workday answering sales inquiries, shipping finished work and posting promotional images on Instagram. In a sense, his hourly rate for this work is zero. “The only time I’m actually making money is when I’m standing at the lathe,” Scott said.
This is the perverse economy of furniture making. A completed set of six chairs could run $10,800. The federal poverty guideline for a one-person household is only $1,000 more. “That kind of money is kind of insane,” Scott said. “People say that to me all the time: 'I love your stuff. I wish I could afford it.' And I say, 'I wish I could, too.'”
Scott sometimes characterises his style, with its unfussy geometry and clean appearance, as “rustic modern.” It’s furniture he wants to make and
furniture he can sell. And these two priorities are not necessarily in competition.
For example, he likes to use logs that he collects with a local sawyer, a weathered maverick named Vince Von Vett – “Triple V” for short.
These are blowdowns from the lake country suburbs. It’s environmentally
sustainable, which makes a good story for the Woodsport website. And the
harvesting gets him outside during the summer, which is where he wants to be. These are also the cheapest boards you can find. At the lumberyard, select-and-better-grade walnut costs $6 to $8 a board-foot. Triple V mills the trees for a quarter of that price. (Scott’s own backbreaking labour is free.)
The tiles for the new dining chair came from field trips with the sawyer. And the fetching curls and burls in the grain looked like prisms under bright light. Another way to put this thought is that if your aesthetic doesn’t jibe with your pricing, you’re not a furniture maker. You’re a contractor, spending half your workweek installing kitchen cabinets and constructing office tables off someone else’s blueprints. Or you’re a hobbyist.Scott practised both of those occupations. And before that he, too, was a hobbyist. At that time, in his 20s, he was training to be a teacher. A perk of the job: free classes in the district’s adult vo-tech programme. “I had no idea how a door was made,” he said. His tastes were simple from the start. “I liked Donald Judd,” he said, referring to the conceptual artist known for his boxes. “When your skills aren’t that great, it’s easy to look at Donald Judd and say, 'I can do that.'”
He built a bedroom set for himself and his wife, and then a crib. “I was sort of burning out on working with kids,” he said. “I was having kids of my own.” Then he met a Minneapolis architect who began giving him jobs in custom millwork and fabrication. He assembled reception desks (ramparts for corporate headquarters) and built-ins for condo conversions.
Scott didn’t quit this trade so much as the trade quit him. “When the economy went in the tank, it really made me stop doing things the way I was working,
building whatever came along,” he said. For $25 a week, he set up a table at the Mill City Farmer Market, above the Mississippi riverfront. And he started hawking his original bowls, benches and cutting boards. Today, some of these early designs fill a showroom in his new wood shop. This is a five-room suite in a hulking old can-spraying factory, which he splits with four other woodworkers.
Show me the money
The key to profitable furniture is replication. He has learned to turn down commissions for one-offs. “If someone called me up and said, 'Can you make a bathroom vanity?' I wouldn’t do it.”
This standard would guide the model chair, too. “Yesterday, I might have been mired in a little self-doubt,” Scott said. “And today I thought, that’s the chair. Why is there always this effort to change it, to make it something it’s not?”
The back slats would come from walnut he’d milled down to 1/16th-inch
veneers. The concept was to laminate them with a very slight curve. He glued these sheets together and clamped them to a solid wood form. Next, he placed the form in a five-by-five-foot vacuum-sealer: a sous-vide bag for a side of
elephant steak. The device cost $1,000.
“This is a ton of work for a stupid little detail,” Scott said. “The piece of wood that comes out of this is a lot stronger than if it was solid wood. So it can be
thinner. It’s a detail I like.” Scott had selected the walnut boards he would be using for the frame. He began to trace the template in three parts: a back leg and post; a seat rail; and a front leg. The plan was to cut them out, join them, then tape the rough outline to the jig and rout the edges.
A router is a violent machine, Scott said. And it makes a mess. The wood shavings will go in a two-cubic-yard Dumpster, with a haulage cost of $100 a month.
If the chair were to enter his furniture line, Scott could farm out these parts to a CNC shop, a computer-controlled router that makes quick, cheap, identical cuts. But then Scott held strong preferences about how the figure of the wood should lie. And he wanted to avoid the imperfections.
You can’t pay a computer to care about knots. Scott relies on other mechanical shortcuts without apology. “Machines are golden and they’re expensive,” he said. He swears by his timesaver: a belt sander he bought for $4,500.
And the lathe, he added, “took me from a dude in a shop making whatever came along to a designer who was producing original work that people sought out to purchase.” This machine is where he turns his popular tables and lamps, whose voluptuous bases suggest the bust mannequins at Lane Bryant.
Scott runs across plenty of Studio Craft furniture at American Craft Council shows, where he sometimes rents a booth. He can appreciate the technical proficiency that goes into melding six types of wood into a single table. He calls it “extreme woodworking” or “woodworking for woodworkers.”
The credenza is one of Scott’s best-sellers: a four-panel rectangular box on a stark steel or bronze frame. The corner door-pulls follow the natural wane, or curve, of the tree. The credenzas cost $4,000 to $7,000. Finishing credenza doors with a timesaver, in other words, leads to the appearance of timelessness.