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2023 woodworking trends   2023 woodworking trends  
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Woodworking Tips

2023 woodworking trends  

A new year doesn’t always bring with it new trends, but January does provide an ideal time to look at and consider the shifts and swings of what’s ‘current’ in the woodworking world.  

Trends are by no means prescriptive at the Chippendale School, where every student is encouraged to find their own signature style – however, it can be fun and informative to look at what is in vogue for a dose of fresh inspiration. 

With this in mind, School Principal Tom Fraser has examined the woodworking trends that look set to stick around in 2023.

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How to buy wood for your next fine furniture project 

For new woodworkers and furniture makers just starting out, there are so many questions to answer and potential pitfalls to navigate – one of the most obvious (and most important!) is where to source your wood, and how to go about it. 

The simple questions are often the vital ones, and there’s nothing more important to a woodworker than where they get their raw material. Chippendale School Principal, Tom Fraser, has many years of experience sourcing wood for our School – read his top tips for buying wood below.  

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How to price furniture – advice for woodworkers 

You’ve lovingly perfected your woodworking skills, put in the hours in the workshop, and finessed your style – it’s finally time to start selling your furniture!  

For many new owners of furniture making businesses, how to price furniture will be first on your list of queries. 

It’s vital that you cost your work fairly to ensure your hard work is being appropriately rewarded. Here Tom Fraser, Principal of the Chippendale School, offers his advice on how to price your furniture. 

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Woodworking careers: Furniture making

For many, a furniture making career feels like a distant dream. Although they have a passion for woodwork and design, many would-be woodworkers don’t realise that furniture making is a viable career option.

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A value for everything, and the cost of selling nothing

In the last of his series of articles on modern woodworking, Anselm Fraser, principal of the Chippendale International School of Furniture, looks at the thorny issue of how to price bespoke furniture.

Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde, the 19th century playwright, would have understood the problem completely.

In his play, Lady Windermere’s Fan, he writes that a cynic is “a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.”

Like much of Oscar Wilde’s work, his comedy hides a biting truth – that we often consider moral or ethical values as being less important than financial worth.  We allow greed to overrule good sense.

It’s an issue that is particularly pertinent for today’s woodworkers, because the value that we place on a beautifully-crafted piece of furniture may be rather more than a prospective customer is prepared to pay for it.

Yes, it may have taken many, many hours to make, using the finest woods, veneers and delicate inlays.  But if that prospective customer is looking for a simple table or chest of drawers, then he or she may be more interested in utility value than financial value.

In other words, spending days and weeks crafting the finest chest of drawers in the whole history of chests of drawers, and placing a huge price tag on it, is no guarantee of a sale.

In a world dominated by IKEA, furniture makers have to look imaginatively at the market, design and build accordingly, and – most importantly – always have a sensible price in mind.  We may be craftsmen and women, but our valuations have to be pragmatic.

The key concept is value.  The painting hanging on our wall may only have aesthetic value, until we discover it’s a Picasso – at which point it acquires huge utility value as a way of paying off the mortgage.

In the same way, good furniture has both utility and aesthetic value.  Our wonderful chest of drawers may be aesthetically beautiful but, if the drawers don’t open properly, it lacks utility value.

That balance between form and function is at the heart of all good design, including architecture and fine woodworking.  Finding that balance is the first thing that furniture designers should always do: who am I selling to, and what are the values my customer is looking for?

The fact is, good design must be about both the aesthetic and the utilitarian and, if necessary, woodworkers shouldn’t be afraid to compromise, if compromise brings down the cost to an acceptable level.

That budget will be influenced by two things – the cost of materials and the labour costs of designing and making the piece of furniture.  It’s a deceptively simple bit of arithmetic: costs + your time = price.

Of course, it’s a little bit more complicated.  Costs aren’t just wood and screws.  They also include everything from heating to water, local taxes to equipment.  For the mathematically dyslexic (and I’m one), it’s a three-step process:

Step One:  Deduct the total cost of your piece of furniture from the income you will receive from it.  If your total cost of production (including an allocation for materials, marketing, rent of workshop etc etc) is £10,000 and you sell for £11,800, your gross profit is £1,800.  Easy-peasy.

Step Two:  It then becomes a little harder, because the next step is to divide gross profit by total income, giving you a gross profit margin of 0.15.

Step Three:  Multiply that figure of 0.15 by 100 to calculate the gross profit margin percentage.  In this case, 0.15 x 100 = 15%.

The British Woodworking Federation (okay, not representing fine furniture makers) says: “When looking at profit margins it is important to make sure that you cover the depreciation of your fixed assets in your profit and loss account so that you can provide the essential cash to replace these with new investments.  As a rule if you are in manufacturing gross margins after direct costs should be in the region of 40 to 50%.”

I wouldn’t disagree with that figure, and improving gross profit margin should always be a clear and unambiguous business objective.  Equally, you have to have realistic expectations about what customers may be prepared to pay.

Being realistic about pricing is key, but you also have to have some clear ideas of what you want from life.  How much income do you want?  In terms of profit, do you also want to generate savings to fund growth?  Do you need to invest in more equipment?

It’s a question of balancing the present with the future – building a business and a reputation, so that, in future years, you can build gross profit margin.  The problem is that many woodworkers think too highly of themselves, and charge a Rolls-Royce rate, when their customer is looking for a Fiat Uno.  (All too infrequently, alas, the opposite can be true!)

Remember that Picasso hanging on your wall?  Also remember that Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso (to give him his Sunday name) survived during his early career in Paris by burning most of his paintings – just to keep warm.

I always advise our students to be pragmatic, certainly until they have built a reputation.  There’s no point in graduating from a furniture school and thinking you are immediately a master of the woodworking universe.

That takes time and, in the meantime, it’s better to under-sell than not to sell.  Remember also another line from Lady Windermere’s Fan: “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”

Start low, be sensible and pragmatic, but always aim higher and higher.

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New lease of life for historic shepherd’s hut, and new course for 2015

An historic part of the countryside is being brought back to life by Scotland’s leading furniture design school.

The humble shepherd’s hut was once a common sight across much of the British countryside, allowing farmers to watch over their flocks by night, particularly during the lambing season.

The project by the Chippendale International School of Furniture, which has completed its first shepherd’s hut, complete with wood-burning stove, also aims to run a specific shepherd’s hut course in the summer of 2015.

The 4-8 week course will teach a range of woodworking skills, with students also building their own shepherd’s hut.

The traditional hut was a small one-room structure with cast-iron wheels and, internally, contained a bed for the shepherd, some basic amenities such as a stove, and feedstuffs and medicines for the animals.

Shepherd's Hut at The Chippendale School of Furniture

The first recorded shepherd’s hut dates back to the 16th century and they were a common rural fixture in the 18th and 19th centuries.  During World War II they were sometimes used as Home Guard outposts or as accommodation for prisoners-of-war working on farms.  However, by the 1950s, very few remained.

The Chippendale school, which takes furniture design students from across the world, believes that there are new markets for the shepherd’s hut – everything from home offices and spare bedrooms (with indoor toilet and shower facilities) to outdoor gyms, storage sheds or workshops.

With the shepherd’s hut being of limited size and with wheels, it more resembles a caravan than a fixed structure, and not normally subject to planning regulations.

Anselm Fraser, Principal of the Chippendale School, said:  “Our intensive 30-week courses teach students traditional woodworking skills, as well as practical business skills to turn their craftsmanship into commercial success.

“But we also want our students to realise that excellence in woodworking can be put to use in different ways – for example, boatbuilding or, in this case, bringing an almost-forgotten part of the past back to life.”

The school also believes that history could turn full circle, with NFU Mutual in 2012 estimating that 69,000 farm animals were stolen at a cost to farmers of some £6 million.

“While we want to reinvent the shepherd’s hut for the 21st century, it may still have a role to play in keeping farmers’ livestock safe at night,” said Anselm Fraser.

Prices and further information on the shepherd’s hut course, which will be run in July 2015, are available from the Chippendale school.  Visitors to the school are always welcome during office hours.

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Latest Posts

apply for our intermediate (4-week) course bursary  
31st January 2023
apply for our intermediate (4-week) course bursary  
2023 woodworking trends  
26th January 2023
2023 woodworking trends  
How to buy wood for your next fine furniture project 
16th December 2022
How to buy wood for your next fine furniture project 

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Gifford
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