Furniture used to last generations. Now it barely survives a move. Industry insiders explain.
No one expects an Ikea bookcase or West Elm sofa to last for generations, or maybe even to survive another move. But walk intoand you’ll find all types of old pieces that were inexpensive and mass-produced in their day, yet have still managed to achieve heirloom status.
, the more affordable stuff was typically made domestically of American plywood — i.e., thin layers of wood glued together — while fancier pieces might be solid cherry or oak, and could be made in the United States or come from Italy or Denmark. Today, most of what’s on the marketand plywood, while pieces marketed as “solid wood” might be rubber wood with glued-on veneer.
Today’s cheaper materials and construction go hand-in-hand with the voyage that most new furniture takes across the ocean. The mainstreaming of container shipping in the 1970s “effectively erased distance” as a manufacturing concern, says Christopher Mims, author of “Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door.” “It’s just so mind-bogglingly efficient and cheap” to transport goods around the world.
“You are working so ruthlessly to keep the price, that initial cost, low,” she says. “When you get back the drawing from overseas, whether that’s India or China or Indonesia, you’re reworking the drawings to make them cheaper or you are saying, ‘Can we substitute this for this?’ … so that I can get this product into a price point that the consumer is willing to pay.”
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