What Does It Actually Take to Build Furniture From the Soil Up?
What Does It Actually Take to Build Furniture From the Soil Up?
Most of us sit on hundreds of products a day. We rarely ask where the material inside them actually came from- not the country of origin on a spec sheet, but the real story. Who grew it? Who harvested it? What happens to it when we're done with it?
That question is uncomfortable for a reason. Most of the furniture industry can't answer it.
Justin Beitzel and Fernando Ramirez can. They're the founders of Common Object Studio and the furniture brand Okaterra, and they built a company by starting exactly where most of us stop: at the raw material, before the product even exists.
The supply chain isn't an afterthought. It's the design.
Most companies start with a product idea, then find someone to source the materials. Justin and Fernando flipped that order. Before they sketched a single chair, they were on the phone with farmers. "The exploration of the supply chain should be in the product design perspective," Justin told me, not something you force-feed at the beginning or bolt on at the end, but the actual design work.
That's a real shift. It means the palette of what you can build is defined by who you can partner with, not the other way around. Wool from a Pennsylvania sheep farm. Hemp webbing and rope from growers trying to bring the crop back to the U.S. Flax. A perennial grass called Miscanthus growing in West Virginia. Fallen lumber out of Baltimore that would have ended up in a landfill or a chipper. That's not a marketing story bolted onto a finished product. That's the actual bill of materials.
Waste, in the right hands, is a business model.
The clearest example is a material most people would throw away. Short-fiber "waste wool" doesn't meet the bar for clothing, so it's typically a low-value byproduct for a sheep farmer. Okaterra found a way to process it into something usable and pay a premium for it.
That's how they met Melissa, a sheep farmer outside Philadelphia with about 200 head. She wasn't a farmer ten years ago; she was a physical therapist who fell into raising sheep and started breeding for diversity instead of yield, which meant healthier animals, fewer antibiotics, and better land. Justin and Fernando call her the third founder of Okaterra. She's since opened her own fiber mill. A byproduct she used to give away became a reason to grow her business.
That's the part worth sitting with. This isn't a company writing a check to offset something bad. It's a company finding value other people were throwing out and routing it back to the person who grew it.
Sustainability doesn't have to mean less.
Here's the line from Justin that stuck with me most: "Sustainability doesn't have to be about less. It can be such a rich and rewarding more." Not fewer emissions, not smaller margins, not doing without, but finding what's already working in a community or an ecosystem and pushing on it harder.
That's a different frame than most of the industry uses. We tend to talk about sustainability as subtraction: less waste, less carbon, less harm. Okaterra treats it as addition: more income for a farmer, more biodiversity in a field, more story attached to the object sitting in your boardroom.
None of this scales easily. Justin and Fernando are candid about it. Regionalizing this model in a new market took a year and a half the first time, and closer to six months the second, because they'd already built the framework. That's a hard, patient way to build a company. It's also, I'd argue, the only way this kind of story holds up under scrutiny.
If you're in this industry and you've ever wondered whether "sustainable" is doing any real work on a spec sheet, go find out where your material actually came from. Not the certification. The farm.
This idea came out of a conversation with Justin Beitzel and Fernando Ramirez on "What Happens When Product Designers Start Thinking Like Farmers?" on Episode 199 of The Trend Report. It's worth a listen for the full picture and an amazing story!