Lady Ox Ponders: How can Furniture Learn from the Foodie?

Last night I couldn't sleep. Per usual?

Usual - usually means worrying about money, dreading my cog-in-the-BROKEN-machine day job, hating I am not creating art, wondering how my peers from grad school are making this all work, dirty dishes, new tires, death and taxes.

NO! This time is wasn't per usual brain-babble. I couldn't sleep, I couldn't sit still, because I was going to do it - quit my job and work full-time for the company that Clayton and I have been slaving for and dreaming of for the last 5 years of our lives.

When I can't sleep, I read my fancy-smart-phone...stocks, news, facebook, twitter. I read an article about the previous post - underground food markets. [See earlier post for article]

I read about an underground market in San Francisco, my heart away from Durham, where locavores get together and feast on the most innovative culinary arts there are presently. Local chefs and foodies skirt the red-tape of food laws by creating a private club, to which membership is free, to allow for innovation with out the parameters of BIG FOOD corporations. Vendors come with their chocolate-dipped prosciutto and snow made from frozen milk steeped with chilis. People growing produce on roof top gardens and cooking in their tiny city apartments. Allowing the people to have the control of what they eat and bringing passion back to consumption.

Can this happen with furniture? Clayton Oxford is doing it!

One thing that always happens when I meet a freshly graduated furniture design student or recently matriculated artist from the academy, the idealism is burning in their declarations about "the handmade" and "their process" and artistry and blah, blah, blah. Don't get me wrong. All of that is essential to being and artist. Identity. Vision. Work ethic. Commitment.

That isn't what bothers me. What they don't acknowledge in their pursuits is that their is a 200 year old industry born in High Point, NC of furniture. This is the dialogue that they are entering regardless if they are making furniture in their garage or in a factory in China. The moment you want to enter the market to sell your designs, whether you like it or not, you are part of it.

The Furniture Industrial Complex

There was the artisan. There was the assembly line. When a wood cabinet was made of wood that was crafted and pieced together. Then came the marketing. Then came the demand. Then came the need for quantity. With quantity came lack of quality. NUFF SAID. (I can elaborate more later)

SO what is Clayton Oxford doing that reflects the idea of the underground of food market? Getting materials - where ever he can locally - bamboo from the forest, barn wood from an abandoned residence in the country, metal scraps, etc. The difference is in the production.

In their 55,000 square foot warehouse in Durham, NC, Clayton Oxford's production creates quality furniture that can be made in relatively large quantities - this is the key. Clayton designs with the crucial premise that beauty and quality needs to be able to sell to a larger market in order to compete with the existing furniture industrial complex.

Food Raves, or Street Meat Gussied Up For Hipsters, Is A Thing Now

First it was organic, then it was local. Then came the farmer’s markets and the cultural cool that comes with cooking. Soon, the food trucks rolled into towns and all of a sudden, the simple act of eating became swallowed up by the same hegemony usually reserved for rock clubs and tattoo parlors.

So it seems that because the mainstream has continually embraced the cool things in the food industry, the cool kids have resorted to starting underground food raves. Yup, it’s come to this. The underground food raves are essentially hush-hush late-night food markets, the kind of things one would normally only see when Anthony Bourdain traipses through the late-night food markets of Southeast Asia.

The underground market seeks to encourage food entrepreneurship by helping young vendors avoid roughly $1,000 a year in fees — including those for health permits and liability insurance — required by legitimate farmers markets. Here, where the food rave — call it a crave — was born, the market organizers sidestep city health inspections by operating as a private club, requiring that participants become “members” (free) and sign a disclaimer noting that food might not be prepared in a space that has been inspected.

Members of the gathering have few qualms about the sampling. “I want something savory and awesome,” said David McDonald, who works with Ms. Corpuz and estimates that he spends 40 percent of his income on dinners. “I want food that will put me in a coma before I go to sleep.”

Fueled by Twitter and Facebook, the phenomenon, which began in San Francisco, has now spread to other parts of the country, including Atlanta and Washington.

“When I was their age I was doing drugs and going to rock shows,” Novella Carpenter, an urban farmer and author, told the New York Times. She recently got into a spat with the City of Oakland for selling chard and other produce at a pop-up farm stand without a permit. “That’s not their culture. Their culture is food — incredible yummy-tasting food.”

All of this would be easier to stomach (har har) if these underground food markets were less about DIY cultural capital for foodies and more honest about their intentions, which essentially amounts to not wanting to pay the rising costs associated with traditional farmer’s markets.

“The small-batch economics just don’t work,” said Iso Rabins, 30, who started the San Francisco food rave back in 2009, according to the New York Times. He cites the costs for renting commercial kitchen space ($45 to $75 an hour), as well as the farmer’s market fees — business and product liability insurance (around $250), space rental ($40 to $55 a day), yearly member fees (around $110), and a health and safety permit (about $500) – as his reasons for starting this movement.

The goal is to be an incubator for culinary start-ups, and be a profit-making venture. Vendors pay $50 to reserve a cooking space and return 10 percent of sales over $500 to ForageSF. “The feeling in the food community is that if you’re making money, it’s not something you’re passionate about,” Mr. Rabins said. “But if we actually want to change anything — dedicate our lives to it — we need to make money doing it,” he said.

Amateur cooks around the country are pushing to have the right to sell unlicensed goods directly to consumers. So-called “cottage food” laws that allow products considered nonhazardous, like pies and cookies, exist in 18 states, with five more considering similar legislation.

It’s hard not to escape the feeling that yes, this is cool. It’s incredibly cool. It’s amateur chefs doing what they love to do in a way that’s on their own terms — even if it’s late at night when most people are asleep.

When you watch Anthony Bourdain snake his way through an over-crowded tent city of food, it’s hard not to feel like we’re missing out on that in America. The scents, the smells, the excitement, the pleasure of discovery! But it’s also hard not to get upset at the branding of this new American movement — street meat gussied up for hipster foodies — as something “underground” or “cool,” when it’s really just capitalist in nature, even if the participants refuse to acknowledge that.

[Article reposted from: http://hypervocal.com/culture/2011/food-raves-or-street-meat-gussied-up-for-hipsters-is-a-thing-now/]

High Point Spring Market

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PRESS RELEASE: April 1, 2011

Clayton Oxford Designs, a premier manufacturer and designer of sustainable home furnishings, introduces the Spring 2011 Natural Slice Collection at the International Home Furnishings Market in High Point, N.C. This collection features live-edge slab tables and desks saddled on hand-melded, custom-designed metal bases. One-of-kind cocktail, console and end tables materialize from the inventive construction of reclaimed materials like acacia, mahogany and teak. Each piece is designed by nature and crafted by hand, highlighting the distinctive organic styles and natural elements in the wood grains, knots and holes from the natural root.

With the convenience of a new 19,000-square-foot warehouse in downtown Durham, NC, Clayton Oxford Designs is bringing it all back home. Forging new relationships with local suppliers and artisans, they have increased production in North Carolina while significantly decreasing lead times, even on custom pieces.

“We’re increasing our control over the process by owning the production here in North Carolina,” says Clayton Oxford, the designer and founder. “We can make the most fantastic furniture in the world with materials right here in North Carolina in two weeks from start to finish.”

Lauren Reynolds joined our team in February 2011 as our new Director of Operations & Sales. She has breathed a fresh air of professionalism and organization into a small company of artists. With her extensive experience in event management and accounting, which she honed at New York's Bowery Presents, Lauren has built an infrastructure upon which the business can grow. Her creativity and outsider-mentality breed innovation in the furniture industry.