Manufacturing
By Tom Lassiter
Jason Lutz and his crew have found a way
to soften the seats of their Modern Primitive
furniture, and are using that information to
build a business.
Creating Comfort
A
lot of adjectives come to
mind when first viewing a
bark-covered Vermont Cedar
Chair; comfortable is not one of them.
One might describe the chair as rustic, akin to Appalachian twig furniture.
Its all-natural components – cedar and
manila rope – give it a high Green quotient. It looks authentic and earthy and
sturdy, perfect for a stage revival of
“On Golden Pond.”
Still, one probably wouldn’t say it’s
comfortable on first sight. That verdict
comes only after sitting in a Vermont
Cedar Chair. That’s when the curious
architecture of the seat – 12 individual
lengths of round cedar branches, roped
together like a suspension bridge –
reveals its secret.
Unlike the narrow wooden slats of
an old-timey porch chair or the broader
boards of an Adirondack chair, this seat
offers some give. Shift your weight
from one hip to the other, and it accommodates. Instead of eventually numbing the backside, this seat encourages
the sitter to stay longer.
“They’re deceptive,” says Kevin
Mavelli, a buyer for the retail division
of Vermont Country Store (no relation
to Vermont Cedar Chair Co.). “They
don’t look like the most comfortable
chair, but they are very relaxing. They’re
very, very comfortable. We’ve done
very well with those chairs.”
The Vermont Cedar Chair Co. made
its first appearance at the Casual Market last September, where the backwoodsy furniture contrasted sharply with
the highly refined finishes of resin, aluminum, steel and wicker in neighboring temporary spaces.
The unsophisticated look of the furniture made it stand out. Perhaps some
buyers wrote it off for that reason.
Others, however, gravitated to it.
Among those who looked and liked
were buyers from Cabela’s. The
“World’s Foremost Outfitter” has more
Founder and CEO Jason Lutz in the new
Acadia Rocking Chair beside the flagship
Vermont Rocker; behind him are bundles
of cedar.
than 40 stores nationwide, in addition
to on-line and catalog sales.
Cabela’s joins Plow & Hearth and
the online giant Wayfair.com in offering
the Vermont Cedar Chair’s hand-built
products. That’s an impressive achievement for a tiny startup. The entire workforce of the Vermont Cedar Chair Co.,
including the office staff and production
team, wouldn’t fill a 12-passenger van.
Last year, says Jason Lutz, the Vermont Cedar Chair Co.’s 30-year-old
founder, was “a breakout year for us.”
He understands the enormity of the challenges and opportunities facing his company thus far, but that doesn’t intimidate
The Vermont Adirondack.
26
HEARTH & HOME
FEBRUARY 2015
PHOTOS: 2015© JEB WALLACE-BRODEUR PHOTOGRAPHER.
FEBRUARY 2015
HEARTH & HOME
27
Manufacturing
By Tom Lassiter
Jason Lutz and his crew have found a way
to soften the seats of their Modern Primitive
furniture, and are using that information to
build a business.
Creating Comfort
The Vermont Adirondack.
26
HEARTH & HOME
FEBRUARY 2015
A
lot of adjectives come to
mind when first viewing a
bark-covered Vermont Cedar
Chair; comfortable is not one of them.
One might describe the chair as rustic, akin to Appalachian twig furniture.
Its all-natural components – cedar and
manila rope – give it a high Green quotient. It looks authentic and earthy and
sturdy, perfect for a stage revival of
“On Golden Pond.”
Still, one probably wouldn’t say it’s
comfortable on first sight. That verdict
comes only after sitting in a Vermont
Cedar Chair. That’s when the curious
architecture of the seat – 12 individual
lengths of round cedar branches, roped
together like a suspension bridge –
reveals its secret.
Unlike the narrow wooden slats of
an old-timey porch chair or the broader
boards of an Adirondack chair, this seat
offers some give. Shift your weight
from one hip to the other, and it accommodates. Instead of eventually numbing the backside, this seat encourages
the sitter to stay longer.
“They’re deceptive,” says Kevin
Mavelli, a buyer for the retail division
of Vermont Country Store (no relation
to Vermont Cedar Chair Co.). “They
don’t look like the most comfortable
chair, but they are very relaxing. They’re
very, very comfortable. We’ve done
very well with those chairs.”
The Vermont Cedar Chair Co. made
its first appearance at the Casual Market last September, where the backwoodsy furniture contrasted sharply with
the highly refined finishes of resin, aluminum, steel and wicker in neighboring temporary spaces.
The unsophisticated look of the furniture made it stand out. Perhaps some
buyers wrote it off for that reason.
Others, however, gravitated to it.
Among those who looked and liked
were buyers from Cabela’s. The
“World’s Foremost Outfitter” has more
PHOTOS: 2015© JEB WALLACE-BRODEUR PHOTOGRAPHER.
Founder and CEO Jason Lutz in the new
Acadia Rocking Chair beside the flagship
Vermont Rocker; behind him are bundles
of cedar.
than 40 stores nationwide, in addition
to on-line and catalog sales.
Cabela’s joins Plow & Hearth and
the online giant Wayfair.com in offering
the Vermont Cedar Chair’s hand-built
products. That’s an impressive achievement for a tiny startup. The entire workforce of the Vermont Cedar Chair Co.,
including the office staff and production
team, wouldn’t fill a 12-passenger van.
Last year, says Jason Lutz, the Vermont Cedar Chair Co.’s 30-year-old
founder, was “a breakout year for us.”
He understands the enormity of the challenges and opportunities facing his company thus far, but that doesn’t intimidate
FEBRUARY 2015
HEARTH & HOME
27
Manufacturing
him in the least. A series of aggressive
rollouts are planned for the months ahead.
“We feel like this year is going to
be gangbusters,” he says.
Conceived in Jamaica
Lutz was studying mechanical engineering at Ohio State University when he
went to Jamaica on summer break prior
to his senior year. His purpose was to
help a friend construct a house, but he
wound up obsessed with how the local
population was employing the island’s
plentiful natural resources to make products for export.
“I had this idea for a bamboo, fairtrade furniture company,” Lutz recalls.
Inspired by the comfort of a suspended hammock chair, Lutz designed
a traditional chair with an unconventional seat. Instead of being rigidly fixed,
the chair’s seat floated in the frame,
attached to the back and suspended from
the sides by rope.
“Being very ambitious and naive,
we made a prototype,” he says. “It was
comfortable and unique looking.”
Lutz returned to Ohio State, tried
unsuccessfully to create some buzz for
his chair idea, and earned his degree
in 2008. In addition to the chair design,
his summertime experience in rural
Jamaica had impressed upon him the
tremendous obstacles to creating a manufacturing business there.
His suspension chair ideas were sidelined as he began to get inquiries from
potential employers. Bright engineers
are in demand, but the prospect of being
deskbound for the next 40 years conflicted with his hands-on, entrepreneurial spirit.
Lutz was visiting his mother at her
farm in Vermont, still trying to figure
out his future, when a disaster for her
became a green light for his dreams.
Loggers hired to thin out some woodland mistakenly clear-cut the land. The
ground was littered with branches and
trunks of young white cedars, wood too
scrawny to haul to the mill.
“The light bulb went off,” Lutz
recalls.
He went about replicating his chair
design, substituting white cedar for
bamboo. Every aspect of the undertaking was an experiment. “It wasn’t
like I had a pattern to go off of,” he
Manila rope.
These pieces of cedar that have been cut and
prepped will shortly become a seat.
The company is rapidly outgrowing its 4,000 sq. ft. factory, and shortly will move to a larger facility.
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FEBRUARY 2015
Manufacturing
says, “and I didn’t have any traditional
training.”
Getting the seat to perform to his
expectations “took a lot of iterations.”
But would the design appeal to others? New England craft shows provided the forums he needed – a low
cost of entry and lots of potential customers in a short time.
The chairs sold out at his first show.
Lutz was on to something.
“Doing the craft show circuit
allowed me to get customer feedback,”
he says. “You have 10 seconds, and
in those 10 seconds, customers will
tell you a lot, if you listen. I had three
years of focus groups. That face-toface, direct feedback was invaluable
in helping us develop what we have
today.”
Pros: “The uniqueness. The comfort.
There’s no rigid support. They love that
aspect.”
Divided opinions: “They take their
hand and feel the bark. Some people
loved that and some people didn’t.”
Cons: “The first chairs I made were
massive. I’m 6 ft. 4 in., about 220
pounds. So the first furniture I made
was for myself. A woman would sit
down, and her feet couldn’t touch the
ground. I had to constantly scale them
down to the average-size person.”
Lutz stuck with the craft-show circuit, adding the Philadelphia Flower
Show and The Big E, a regional fair
in Massachusetts. The chairs continued
to sell well.
Acadia Rocker.
An employee uses a hydraulic jig to hold parts
in place as he weaves them into a seat.
One early craft show customer was
Carolyn Rafaelian, a Rhode Island jewelry artisan and entrepreneur who is CEO
of the trendy Alex and Ani brand.
Rafaelian later purchased 200 Vermont
Cedar Chairs for another of her ventures, Carolyn’s Sakonnet Vineyard. Lutz
says the chef there swears food and drink
sales went up after the chairs appeared.
Customers, he tells Lutz, get comfortable, linger longer, and spend more.
In late 2013, Lutz took his chairs to
a home show in Boston where they
caught the attention of Brian Mattei (pronounced matty). The two men hit it off
instantly. Mattei, whose prior experience
included overseeing a national sales organization for an Italian commercial equipment maker, saw potential.
Lutz recalls him saying, “I’m a
salesman. This is what I do. I’d really
like to take it on.” Mattei is now director of sales and Lutz’s number-one
cheerleader.
Off & Running
An employee lashes the final corner of the back to the frame of an Acadia Rocking Chair.
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FEBRUARY 2015
The business started by Lutz and his
wife, Sarah Cooke, was reconfigured
to become the Vermont Cedar Chair
Co. The firm operates from a 4,000 sq.
ft. facility in Hardwick, Vermont. The
unincorporated village (population 3,010)
is about 25 miles northeast of Montpelier, the capital.
All the white cedar is harvested by
hand from stands within a 30-mile radius
of Hardwick. A video on the company
website explains that only trees with a
trunk diameter of four in. or less are
felled. This thinning process creates a
better environment for the larger trees
to fully mature.
The company currently employs a
production team of five. Each chair is
built by hand, starting with choosing
each piece of timber. Workers select
pieces of similar size for the uprights,
for the seat, and for the back.
Manufacturing
Irregularities, such as where smaller
branches forked off, are smoothed away,
leaving each piece mostly covered in
bark. Only the curved bases for the
rocker are milled and shaped to uniform dimensions.
The crew can produce an average of
20 chairs a day, Lutz says.
“By the end of the year we’re hoping to double that,” he says. “The nice
thing about this process is that it is
easily scalable. It’s a simple process,
and there are a lot of guys looking for
work.”
Chairs are fully assembled at the
factory to check fit and quality before
being broken down to ship flat.
Reassembling the mortise-and-tenon
components takes about 15 minutes,
Lutz says. “We give the retailers glue
and everything they need to put it
together. A guy can do four of them
an hour; your cost to assemble a chair
is only about five bucks.”
Left in the elements, the cedar bark
weathers to a silvery gray (envision the
gray cedar shingles on a coastal Maine
cottage). The rope, imported from the
Philippines, is said to be one of the
most rot-resistant natural fibers on earth.
It’s the same material as used on generations on sea-going vessels.
The company confidently gives its
rustic cedar and manila furniture a
lifetime warranty. If an item proves
unsatisfactory, the website says, “No
questions asked, just return it to us
and we will send you a new one.”
The entrepreneurs acknowledge
that challenges loom ahead, yet they
remain confident in their ability to
produce goods and manage growth.
The company has signed on more
than 100 retailers, Mattei says, and
they soon will have additional products to sell.
A line of furniture made of dimensional lumber, called Acadia, will join
the original rustic line. Acadia, initially
available only in unfinished white cedar,
features the same suspension seat design.
Lutz says he has applied for U.S. patents
to protect his designs.
The original rustic line, Lutz says,
“was too different for some people’s
décor.” He expects Acadia to “appeal
to a much larger market.”
Products in the Acadia line can be
produced much more quickly because
the components are uniform. Those savings will be passed on to retailers and
consumers, Lutz says.
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HEARTH & HOME
FEBRUARY 2015
He expects the Acadia line to be
available in colors later in the year. In
keeping with the company’s environmental sensitivity, he’s exploring using
whey-based coatings made by another
Vermont company.
Stacked, wrapped and ready to go.
Imports from Vietnam
Lutz has contracted with a Vietnamese
company to produce his designs in a
bamboo version. The first container of
bamboo furniture is expected in the first
quarter of this year. A California logistics company will manage warehousing and shipping.
Lutz has created a separate business,
Bamboo Chair Company, for this line.
The variety of bamboo used, he says,
is quite dense and lacks the hollow core
often associated with bamboo. “This
allows the joints to be much stronger,”
Lutz says.
With the rustic Vermont Cedar Chair,
the Acadia line, and the bamboo line,
Lutz says the products hit three critical price points. A Vermont Cedar rocker
retails for about $395. An Acadia rocker
retails for about $299. A rocker from
Bamboo Chair Company will sell for
about $200. Small tables, stationary
chairs and other items round out each
collection.
A line of teak furniture, also incorporating the suspension-seat design with
modifications, will be launched at the
Casual Market in September. The furniture will be produced in Vietnam by
a firm that Lutz first encountered at the
2014 Casual Market.
“Every porch and patio place has
teak,” Mattei says, “and we want a piece
of it.”
Meanwhile, the initial design is winning over retailers and their customers.
“If we can get people to sit in the
chair, they’re sold,” says Molly Gunsolus, store manager at Mountain Top
Furniture in Blairsville, Georgia. “They
are shocked at just how comfortable
the chairs are. Our customers love the
chairs.”
The quest to perfect his chair design
and build a business has taught Lutz
many lessons, including one with a personal twist.
He was aware that a dining suite in
his mother’s home had been in the family for quite some time. What he hadn’t realized is that the furniture was
made by a firm once owned by his forebears – Grand Rapids Chair Co.
“It lasted until the 1970s,” Lutz says,
“but I didn’t know about it until I started
making furniture. It’s in my blood.”
Two interations of a Bamboo Adirondack sit side by side for comparison.