Is it custom furniture?

Steve Sechrest, COCOCOHome – Co-founder, Charlotte NC

Is it custom furniture?

Many of our customers think because we manufacture made-to-order furniture we are therefore in the custom furniture business. Truly custom designed furniture is very rare and very expensive. We are a North Carolina furniture manufacturer of high end custom sofas, sectionals, and chairs, but If, for example, a customer came into one of our showrooms and asked us to make them a custom Chesterfield which was 40” deep instead of the 38” and 42” depths we currently offer, we would reluctantly decline the job because the costs of designing a new frame and making new patterns for the upholstery would make that sofa very expensive to produce and would not fit within our affordable factory-direct pricing model.
While we clearly make custom built furniture, we like to think of it as well-made furniture that can be ”personalized” to a greater extent than even that offered in very expensive custom furniture galleries. Our furniture may be personalized by the selection of leather (or fabric), by the wide choice of lengths and depths, by changing the cushion configurations, or by adding trim such as nail heads or even genuine Swarovski Crystals. Our customers have used embossed patterned leather on parts of their personalized furniture. Adding hair-on-hide to a sofa or chair as a custom-built accent has become a popular way to personalize our furniture.

Now that’s a “personalized” couch.  Made with Carroll Deja Vu “Prairie Dust” leather, hair on hide lambskin, and a Pendleton blanket provided by the customer.

It is not that we never make truly custom built furniture, in fact, almost all of our furniture styles started that way. In many cases, a customer comes to us and shows us a style they saw somewhere else, be it a Restoration Hardware furniture style or something they found on Houzz, and they ask us if we can make them something similar. If we agree that the style is interesting and we think there is a wider market for the style, whether a traditional furniture style or an on-trend modern furniture style, then we will make it and absorb the costs of patterning. The first one is an authentic piece of North Carolina custom furniture, after that they are personalized furniture pieces.