In October, I spent two days at the High Point Market in North Carolina. While we in the Northeast have a long history of making furniture, North Carolina is widely recognized as this country’s furniture capital, and High Point brings together buyers and sellers in the mother of all trade shows. Three thousand exhibitors from around the world gathered there to introduce this year’s line. Some of the showrooms could be more easily measured in acres than in square feet. Most were divided into dozens of fully furnished rooms complete with slippers under the bed, bread on the cutting boards, and trade journals in the magazine racks. The sales reps are predictably stylish, all with cell phones at the ready in case they inexplicably find themselves with no one to talk to. Adrenaline is the fuel.
Some of the furniture, of course, is made of chrome and glass, but most of it continues to be made of wood. I saw deck chairs of plantation-grown teak along with dining room tables of recycled Malaysian rubber wood and headboards of Oriental oak. But the vast majority of the furniture was made of North American hardwoods. Black walnut is always a crowd pleaser, but more common were the woods found readily in our northern woodlands: black cherry, red oak, ash, birch, and sugar maple.
While the birthplace of these trees wasn’t in question, it was often difficult to pinpoint the location of the factory where they were made into furniture. Today, you can ship maple or cherry lumber halfway around the world, have it skillfully made into furniture of American design, and ship it back for less than it costs to make it here. Most of these dressers and tables are not sold under Asian brands but under those of U.S. companies who have decided to cash in on the opportunities that our evolving relationship with China offers. We buy more wooden furniture from China than from any other country, and our balance of trade is tipped to the East.
A group of U.S. manufacturers committed to keeping their production in this country has petitioned the International Trade Commission and the Department of Commerce, alleging dumping of bedroom furniture on the U.S. market. Their complaint was heard favorably, and duties have been imposed on wooden bedroom furniture imported from China. But that’s little more than a temporary fix.
Buyers and sellers are used to arguing over price, and cutthroat competition between manufacturers is a hallmark of a market economy. But this dispute over imports is dividing the furniture industry in a way that threatens its existence. In a TV news segment covering the issue, a spokesman for an importing company said of the U.S., “This is no longer a manufacturing society. It’s a marketing society.”
Plenty of furniture makers in the Northeast disagree. Yes, the U.S. has lost many manufacturing jobs. And it would be easy to accept as inevitable that the manufacture of wood products will go the way of textiles, moving from New England to the South and then to the world of cheap labor and little environmental oversight. But the difference lies in the raw material itself. Cotton, wool, and synthetics can be produced anywhere, and if the playing field ever gets leveled, they will be produced as close to the manufacturing plant as possible. Our native black cherry, red oak, and sugar maple do not grow just anywhere, and there are no acceptable substitutes. Black cherry from New York and Pennsylvania and sugar maple from Vermont are the most sought-after hardwoods on Earth.
The presence of these perfect woods – durable, easily machined, and capable of being finished to appeal to any taste – is what will keep this industry going. Why should all of us care about the fate of the furniture industry? Because these companies are the very model of what we in the Northeast should be striving to replicate. They make a high-end product out of locally harvested wood, and in doing so, they put money in the hands of thousands of people along the way: landowners, foresters, loggers, truckers, sawmill workers, and their own employees. If we lose these community-based companies, their employees aren’t the only ones who’ll take a hit. If we lose these manufacturers, we’ll all be in the marketing business. But we won’t have anything to sell.