Hasta La Ideas

You’ll probably be surprised to hear that, over a century ago, the largest furniture manufacturer in the world was…the Singer Sewing Machine Company. In the 19th and early 20th Century a sewing machine was not the small plastic thing you see today on Martha Stewart, that can be carried from room to room or tucked in a closet; it was a machine, a heavy one made of steel and cast iron, that needed to be supported in a purpose-built cabinet. And for the sake of domestic palatability, those cabinets were initially ornate Victorian pieces of furniture.

In the 1880s, America’s average furniture-making company employed 11 workers each and produced some $15,000 of goods per year. In contrast, Singer employed over 1,000 in two furniture-specific factories and produced $800,000 to $1 million worth of furniture annually. Singer not only kicked off the domestic appliance category of objects with their series of machines, but completely revolutionized woodworking and mass production by turning a veritable army of talented machinists towards the science of building furniture.

By 1900, Singer had 3,000 woodworkers cranking out two million cabinets per year at just one of their two woodworking factories. Detailed accounting records for the other factory have been lost, but we can assume the output was similar. This amount of production required massive amounts of wood, far more than the cabinet-making shops of New York City and New England could provide. That was why, decades earlier, they made a decision that seems obvious to us now but was well outside-of-the-box for the 19th Century: Let’s build an enormous mass-production furniture facility—hell, let’s build two of them—in the middle of some big-ass hardwood forests in the Midwest. We’ll save tons on sourcing.

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