Why building furniture in the US matters

For most people, living in modern times means you own a lot more stuff. Moreover, all the things that you bring into your home were probably made quite far from where you live. Domestic manufacturing carries true weight when it comes to the durability, quality, and impact of the things you bring into your home, and if you know anything about the folks here at Medley, you know we’ll always stand for buying less and buying better. With every Medley piece built by hand, one-by-one here in the US, it’s one of the choices we’re most proud of. 

What are the benefits of building in the US?

We believe beautiful products can be made anywhere in the world. But, choosing domestically-made furniture has other real and tangible benefits: for the quality of what lands in your home, for the environment, and for the people and communities behind the making of it.

Legacy craftsmanship

Modern furniture is made for consumers with quickly changing needs and preferences, which is part of the reason why so much furniture ends up in landfills in only a few years. That’s a bummer! Furniture that is made by hand by skilled craftsmen takes a different approach.

At Medley, our domestic build partners use time-honored techniques, like classic joinery and corner-blocked frames, to create pieces that will last decades. This results in furniture that lives on, aging beautifully instead of falling apart.

A lot of US-based furniture manufacturing, especially smaller workshops and mills, is still deeply rooted in generational, family trades. Time-honored skills like frame-building, upholstery, and detailed finish work are frequently passed down from one generation to the next, refined over the course of many lifetimes (so cool). That type of legacy knowledge is difficult to replicate at scale, and as a result, it shows in the final product: durable frames, quality joinery, more consistent stitching, and an overall attention to detail that comes from genuinely caring about the craft.

Quality control

As a US-based company, a super underrated advantage of building closer to home is proximity. When your manufacturing partners are easily accessible instead of on the other side of the world, controlling quality becomes a hands-on, regular practice and not a theoretical idea.

Developing furniture in the same country it’s built means brands can actually sit on, test, and closely inspect a piece before it ever hits the production line. At Medley, we take this practice really seriously – we’ve sat on more sofas than we ever thought possible! Our owners and team members spend lots of time at our studio in Portland, Oregon, receiving all prototypes and many production pieces to review and make changes as needed. Ultimately, this means we are able to discuss comfort, make design tweaks, and test durability and construction early on, rather than after a problem piece finds its way into a customer’s home.

The waste footprint

We already know that building furniture in one place, close to home, shortens its supply chain in a considerable way. A huge plus of manufacturing domestically is not simply less transportation, but that it tends to generate less waste across the product’s entire lifecycle.

For example, when manufacturing and fulfillment happen closer to home, furniture companies are able to have much more flexibility in inspecting, cleaning, and reselling gently-used or like-new returned pieces, instead of writing them off. 

While sometimes, a piece is lucky to hit an outlet store, in general, companies that manufacture overseas face longer shipping times and higher return-cost logistics, making it harder and much more expensive to give a returned piece a second chance at life. You know what that means: to the landfill it goes.

Additionally, furniture that’s built with better materials and construction methods is furniture that's built to last, which means fewer pieces heading to landfills over time. When you invest in a well-built piece rather than a disposable one, you're not just buying something for your home; you're opting out of the buy-cheap-replace-often cycle that drives so much of the furniture industry's waste problem in the first place.

Supporting local communities

Each piece of furniture built here in the US is actively supporting US manufacturing jobs, skilled trades, and small businesses. These are the folks keeping quality furniture-making alive — choosing domestically-made pieces is a literal vote for keeping that expertise in the US instead of outsourcing overseas. We think that’s really cool. 

For us, there’s the additional benefit of real relationships. We work closely with our domestic build partners, many of whom bring generations of combined experience to every frame, cushion, and seam. That kind of partnership (built on proximity, communication, and shared standards) is much harder to replicate with an overseas factory you may never actually visit. 

Avoiding unnecessary harm

Furniture spraying upon import

Border agencies (USDA APHIS, in the US) enforce strict regulations to prevent invasive species from entering the country and decimating local ecosystems. One of these regulations involves fumigating the shipping container with a chemical gas (most commonly Methyl Bromide), basically suffocating any living organisms that could be within. 

This is a process that’s primarily performed on wood items. Sofas, sectionals, and chairs often contain wood frames, or are shipped alongside other wood pieces of furniture. Even if the furniture within doesn't require treatment, the wooden elements with the container do, like the pallets or crates holding the items.

While such precautions are taken for good reason, and even after ventilating the container (for usually 16 to 24 hours) to reduce chemical residues, it’s a no-brainer that this type of treatment is not what you’d like to bring into your home. Choosing furniture made in the US completely removes this possibility, and that’s a small win we love.

How Medley Stacks Up

Each Medley piece is built in the US by expert craftsmen. That means our entire team stays closely involved in prototyping, quality checks, and production.

We do our best to source quality, certified materials within the US first and partner with international organizations to source materials that aren’t grown or produced in the US. Here’s a quick breakdown of our most commonly used materials and their location of origin:

• Our FSC-certified solid wood and engineered hardwood plywood: All sourced domestically in the United States. 
• Our GOLS certified organic natural latex: We use 100% GOLS certified organic Dunlop natural latex, sourced from Southeast Asia, where natural latex trees grow in accordance with the natural climate and ecosystem. 
• Our CertiPUR-US® certified poly foam: Manufactured in North Carolina. The ‘US’ in the name signifies that the program and its strict standards were established for the US market.
• Our OEKO-TEX® Standard 100 certified wool: Sourced from New Zealand, where wool is gently shorn from grass-fed, crossbred sheep and sourced from farmers who genuinely care for the environment, maintain healthy ecosystems, and follow the World Organization for Animal Health’s “five freedoms” for animal welfare.
• Our fabrics, certified by OEKO-TEX® Standard 100, Greenguard GOLD, and Declare, Red List free: Sourced from global milling partners and producers. After all, there’s only one place in the world to get river-retted Belgian linen!

All of these exceptional materials come together in the hands of expert American craftsmen. Our upholstered goods are handcrafted in California and North Carolina. Our wood case goods are brought to life in California and Pennsylvania using domestically sourced FSC-certified Maple, Walnut, and Oak. Our GOLS-certified natural latex mattresses are manufactured in Chicago, Illinois.

We choose to build our products in the US because supporting our communities to the fullest extent we can is important to us. Building each piece to order domestically also means our finished products travel less to get to you, lowering everyone’s environmental footprint.

The Bottom Line

Building in the US reflects a different set of standards and practices. At Medley, building our furniture right at home is central to who we are: it lets us maintain quality control, work directly with our amazing manufacturing partners, lower our environmental footprint, and craft pieces made to last a lifetime. We think that's worth choosing every time.

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