How do you keep a furniture program consistent across reorders?

Reorders drift through small changes nobody approved

Drift usually arrives through ordinary changes: a fabric mill ships a new dye lot, a hardware item goes out of stock and a near-equivalent takes its place, a foam supplier changes its formula or a piece is rebuilt from memory instead of from the approved sample.

Each change is small and easy to defend on its own. Added up over several reorders, they can produce a chair your customers notice isn't the same chair.

Four controls that help reorders match the approved sample

An approved sample kept for reference

Keep the approved sample, at the factory or with you, so each run can be checked against it and questions about what the piece should be are settled by looking at it. In our OEM furniture manufacturing programs, each production run and reorder is checked against the approved sample.

A specification locked at the component level

Foam densities, spring type, frame species and hardware are named specifically, so any substitution needs your approval before it goes into production.

A plan for dye lots

If color matters, buy fabric for the whole program at once, or agree in advance how much variation between dye lots you'll accept.

The same factory

A program kept at one factory is easier to repeat than one that moves to whoever quoted lowest that round. At E and J Furniture, each reorder goes through the same in-house departments as the first production run: frame shop, cut and sew, foam, finishing and shipping.