For furniture quality and durability, consider who manufactured the pieces. These items are usually handcrafted with great care by an artisan passionate about woodworking, making each piece unique. Using reclaimed or natural wood products means your hand crafted piece is truly one of a kind – you will never see another one like it. Traditionally, handcrafted furniture is passed down as a family heirloom, so longevity is important.
For mass-produced furniture, typically pieces produced in a factory by machines are more affordable and wear down faster than their handcrafted counterparts; however, furniture durability and longevity ultimately depend on the quality of construction materials and how the pieces were assembled. Mass-produced furniture can be built to quality standards, but obviously there will be hundreds of identical pieces out there.
When comparing hand-crafted and mass produced, another factor to consider is customization. When dealing with the builder, you will have much more flexibility in customizing your piece. When each item is built by hand, it is much easier to make adjustments to the size or shape to fit your exact needs.
With mass-produced furniture, you may have a few color or fabric choices, but you are very limited in variations. The cost is too high to change production for one customer.
Work by hand takes less energy than a mass production assembly line, provided that the craftsman works to reduce his waste effectively. As far as the materials themselves, our products are made with either locally renewable wood or reclaimed wood.
A lot of energy also can go into shipping a piece of furniture. Because more mass production is being sourced to Asian countries, that chair might have already racked up quite the carbon footprint in its journey to the mall.
You can save a few bucks, follow the crowd and buy mass produced products and replace them every few years, or you can invest in making your home as unique as you are by purchasing handcrafted furniture and decor, heirloom quality pieces made just for you.
