Inside one company’s struggle to fix the “monstrosities” of the furniture industry

Take a second and look around you. Whether you’re reading this from your home or from your office, chances are you will come across a piece of wood furniture that you use every day. Have you ever wondered how far that wood traveled to get to you?

马克·萨姆索诺维奇（Mark Samsonovich）没有为他所谓的家具业务的“怪兽”做好准备。The artist, designer, and self-described “serial entrepreneur” had been making furniture for himself for over a decade, but it wasn’t until he set out to start a furniture company that he came face to face with the deep-seated challenges of the fast furniture monster, its dysfunctional supply chain, and the terrible toll it has on the planet.

Two years ago, Samsonovich founded Jersey City-based Head of Marble with the goal of making high-quality furniture that’s easy to assemble, can last a lifetime, and is made from non-toxic materials that are both sourced and manufactured in the United States. By the end of 2020, Head of Marble had removed three times as much carbon as it had created, in part by limiting its supply chain to the confines of the United States. Head of Marble is a new kid on the furniture block, but it’s here to challenge conventions plaguing the furniture industry. Together with a number of small furniture companies that are choosing to build their own supply chain—and produce furniture in the United States—Head of Marble is showing the urgent need for a radical shift in the way companies make and transport furniture.

The furniture industry generates 12 million tons of waste every year in the United States. In 2019, 15 companies (including Home Depot, Ikea, Target, and Ashley Furniture)生成通过在货船上进口商品，几乎与150万美国房屋所使用的能源一样多。And that’s only a fraction of the overall footprint of furniture, which has to take into consideration the full life cycle, from the cost of sourcing raw materials, and the finishes used in manufacturing, to the construction and transportation energy required to get it to market, all the way to where the piece of furniture ends up (80.2% of those 12 million tons of waste went to landfills in 2020).

所以回到你附近的那块木头。它走了多远才能到达您的客厅？正如Samsonovich所解释的那样，在美国森林中砍伐的一棵树经常将其运送到木材厂，然后将其运送到木材场，然后运往亚洲的制造商。（截至最近，越南是最大家具出口商到美国。在它终于到达您的前门之前。最后。Samsonovich说：“一棵树可能只有300英里的路程可以行驶30,000英里，然后才能作为一件家具到达客户。”

大理石木材头的头不会越过大西洋。他说：“我的制造商都与我开车距离。”但这带来了费用。Samsonovich说：“我无法表达要做我们正在做的事情并与消费者对桌子的期望竞争到底是多少贵。”

您可能会认为，将30,000英里至300英里的旅程凝结会为公司节省资金，但Samsonovich表示，世界各地的运输成本实际上很低，因为商品通常在运输容器中扁平化（因为当前的供应链旨在促进这一过程 - 稍后再进行）。美国制造业的最大障碍是劳动力。Samsonovich的解决方法是设计不需要数小时的工作的极其高效的产品，同时每小时至少要支付25美元。

At the moment, the company’s only product is an A-frame table. It can be assembled without tools, and its trestle system allows people to upgrade any part of the table without having to throw out the whole product. For $980, you can start with a birch plywood top. If you want solid wood, you can buy a maple tabletop (for $1,599) designed to fit over the existing trestle system. The price tag isn’t too far off from other mid-market tables, but Samsonovich says his margins are much narrower. Sometime in the future, he envisions a marketplace for second-hand parts that people can purchase. “We really want to change the idea of disposable furniture and change the way people think about upgrading furniture,” he says.

As the climate crisis reaches a tipping point (a recent UN report found that greenhouse gas levelshit a record去年高），越来越多的家具公司正在努力寻求更可持续的方法。宜家has announced a slew of initiatives旨在到2030年成为气候正面。赫尔曼·米勒（Herman Miller）承诺到2023年零废物. Pottery Barn set a goal ofplanting 3 million treesby 2023. But according to Alan Scheller-Wolf, a professor of operations management at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business, the furniture industry can’t effectively curb its carbon footprint when so much of it relies on an unsustainable transportation supply chain.

大流行期18个月以上，美国人继续在记录号码, and ports around the world are在接缝处爆裂. If more goods were made in the western hemisphere, Scheller-Wolf says we wouldn’t have to rely on our ports—或让他们24/7- 通过该国的前门获取这些商品。他说：“在美国制造可能值得我们回来。”“有一个商业案例，要制定营销案例。”

许多公司确实在美国生产家具。More than 90% of the furniture由房间和董事会出售在美国制造。总部位于底特律的弗洛伊德has been manufacturing its furniture in the U.S. since it debuted on Kickstarter in 2014. Sabai, a small, woman-owned furniture company based in High Point, North Carolina, uses domestically sourced, Forest Stewardship Council-certified wood. Its frame supplier is based in South Carolina, and the furniture is upholstered at a manufacturing facility in High Point, then shipped straight to customers.

Since Sabai launched in mid-2019, the company has also started offering a “Repair Don’t Replace” policy to further reduce the environmental toll of producing and shipping furniture. “Our approach has always been to try to look at sustainability as comprehensively as we can,” says Phantila Phataraprasit, who cofounded the company with Caitlin Ellen.

But most companies can’t simply flip a switch and change their supply chain overnight. For Samsonovich, the biggest challenge is to manage the expectations of customers who are spoiled by the convenience of online shopping and the affordability of fast furniture sites like e-commerce giant Wayfair.Scheller-Wolf教授还认为，球在消费者法庭上。他说：“这取决于我们作为购买家具的人愿意为之付款的人。”“如果我们决定愿意为更可持续的家具付费，则该行业将采取行动为此服务。”

这并不是说世界其他地方都无法帮助我们到达那里。Scheller-Wolf相信全球供应链问题正在扼杀许多行业，包括家具, could lead to more production in the United States—and structural changes in domestic transportation. “This is a time we could step back and think about how we want to move freight in this country in the next 20 to 30 years,” he says. Electric vehicles are one solution, but where he sees true potential is in the country’s rail and river network. “If we move toward a travel network that was based on water or rail, the [carbon] footprint would go way down,” he says. “I’m optimistic this is the sort of thing that can lead to change because business and society sees that there’s a need.”