Yep. After all that work designing and building a special angled coffee table to fit our sofa chaise perfectly....we decided to completely demolish it.
"What coffee table was that again??" you may ask.
Check out the coffee table blog post AND this video right below:
Why the heck would we do THAT?! Why destroy a perfectly good coffee table after you spent so much time designing and building it?? Well...it wasn't for selfish reasons.
It wasn't because we hated the original. It wasn't because it warped or exploded. Because it didn't. It was perfectly fine.
HOWEVER, we needed to get going on building a prototype coffee table that we wanted to sell people after they bought a cutting/charcuterie board! We need to know how we want the final design to be laid out, how much materials cost, how to streamline production, anddddd some product pictures for our website and social media platforms.
After all....we really need to show people what we want to sell them before we can expect them to buy anything. That's called "building your portfolio" - something we talk about in great length in our Marketing Course!
We decided we wanted this prototype to be solid Ash...because we want the majority of our products to be made from Ash. Annndddd it so happens that we already had a solid Ash table top on our existing coffee table!! So, we decided to cannibalize it to create the majority of this next coffee table. Also, we're planning on keeping this prototype for ourselves....seeing as we were coffee table-less after this whole ordeal...
So we sat down to create our prototype design!
We had been pondering what exactly we wanted to do for kind of a while...and we had gotten plenty of...."suggestions" from multiple people. Which is great and all, but there's no way we can possibly take into account everybody's opinions:
- "Make it farmhouse!"
- "Ohhhh make it modern and sleek!"
- "You should make 5 different sizes"
- "Offer a ton of wood stain options!"
- "I saw this one table that had a hidden drawer on the bottom!"
- "You should really do hand-turned legs...."
- "aLL dOvEtAils!!!"
Holy overwhelming, Batman. How do we determine our final prototype design when we have alllll of that information spinning around in our heads??
We don't listen to all of it.
I'm not saying we don't listen to ANY of it....just not ALL of it. We have to determine which information is worth it.....who is it coming from? Do they build furniture? Do they have a business? Are they big in the design world? Not all advice that people give you is necessarily advice that you need to take!! (sigh of relief, right?)
But before we even dive into other peoples' advice, we need to do some research of our OWN!!
What do we know to be true?
- Farmhouse and farmhouse modern style furniture is still HUGE here in the South.
- If we truly want to scale our products, we really can't offer an insane amount of options.
- We need repeatable steps.
- It needs to be high in quality, and not too high in complexity.
- We need to stick to a price point of around $1,000.
Sooooo we ended up listening to 1/7 pieces of advice from the list above. And that's OKAY!! What works for you may not work for everyone and vice-versa.
And there we had it. Our solid Ash farmhouse coffee table was designed! We got to work building all of the main pieces....to include the parts made from our old table top. We definitely took the time to document the order of our steps (since this entire table build will make its way into its own checklist) and made some minor tweaks in the plans as we found better ways to do things.
But overall it went much smoother than expected! Assembly and final product pictures coming soon!!
#woodworking #woodworkingbusiness #entrepreneur #coffeetable #farmhouse #farmhousemodern #livingroom #design #Ash #furniture #furniture business
This post may contain affiliate links for products we used to create this project! If you’d like to check them out, we do get a small percentage of the sale and they are of no extra cost to you! It all goes towards supporting the content creation of Jennie and Davis. BUT – we do not take tool sponsorships and there were no tool endorsements. Just our honest opinions!