Just off a busy road near Pasig City Hall, there is an old converted house that is home to a design studio. For a few weeks in July, it was the home for an exhibit that at first seemed to be like any other of its kind. Wellmade Supply Studio, who calls that house its home, hosted the first iteration of its REDO Initiative, an effort to bring together designers and artists to make use of high quality but slightly unusable furniture that would otherwise sit in a warehouse.
At the opening night of REDO: DEAD STOCK EVOLUTION, the initiative's exhibitionary component which set these reworked furniture pieces in the studio’s airy loft along with paintings and other art, the team was surprised to find that, despite getting 70 confirmations, twice that many showed up. The excitement was palpable as people filled the space. For a concept that seems like a no-brainer—who wants to see good furniture go to waste—the interest was very strong.
The story behind REDO is one of bringing together experience, expertise, and imagination, and it features a studio whose name even the author hadn’t heard of until he met the studio’s curator and spokesperson, Daisy Crichton-Stuart, at an art fair earlier this year.
Established in 2014 by Erika Hernandez, whose family has been in the furniture manufacturing business for years, Wellmade Supply Studio designs and supplies furniture for various clients. The family’s plant manufactures pieces of furniture at scale, mainly for clients such as restaurants and other businesses. What made her new studio different was that she wanted to bring the lessons she learned into designing furniture pieces that she found beautiful. At the same time, she was into leather work, and this informed her knowledge and appreciation of local craftsmanship. The studio name’s initials, WM, also stands for “wooden mallet,” a reminder that making furniture is as much a craft as it is an aesthetic enterprise. As Crichton-Stuart told the author, “She would be really hands on with all the details.”
Wellmade’s business took off during the pandemic, ensuring that Hernandez received a steady stream of customers who found time to renovate their houses and reimagine their living spaces. As business resumed after the lockdowns, the studio started taking on commercial clients and making plans to expand their business, including the export market. Last November, the company released its first furniture collection, a French-inspired line called Loft L’Artisan. Even its pieces are customizable, tapping on the company’s core strengths.
Wellmade finds itself in a very competitive field, that of high-end furniture. Most of the firms in this market work with overseas companies, some of whose designs have international prominence. However, high demand for such designs and pieces has led to the phenomenon of “fast furniture,” which, like its “fast fashion” cousin, relies upon cheap manufacturing and materials to please clients in the short term and (when no longer usable) become landfill material. To set itself apart, Wellmade emphasizes how its work relies upon local designers and craftspeople whose particular skills and expertise give the work a quality that, as the firm claims, other manufacturers could not match. Thus, it is not surprising that the next logical step would be to bring together craft and art in the service of bucking the “fast furniture” trend. The way Wellmade does it? Raising dead (furniture) stock to life.
The REDO project was an offshoot of what Hernandez’s family furniture company did for several years, which started when a couple with past careers in aviation got a factory, some machines, and men looking for work. The business grew, and in the process, there were pieces left in storage, which the Wellmade team discovered on a factory visit for another client. It was when seeing what could be described as an abyss of off-cuts and neglected furniture that Hernandez and Crichton-Stuart decided to do something with these pieces, of which there are roughly 800. These pieces are, in industry jargon, “dead stock.”
Crichton-Stuart emphasizes that “dead stock” furniture, which are at the heart of REDO, are not “unsellable” in the sense that they are of poor quality. “It’s more about giving [these pieces a] new purpose,” she says, with some in mint condition and a fair number, thanks to the ravages of time, are “shells of what they used to be.” What these pieces have in common is the high quality of the wood used, a good starting point for creative reconstruction. “It would be a waste to throw away a lot of their potential,” she says.
Crichton-Stuart says that REDO isn’t just an exhibit of redone furniture. In fact, she says that some other pieces from the dead stock have become custom pieces for Wellmade’s clients, including a beach-inspired collection for a La Union establishment where the upholstery’s drab brown was replaced by something much livelier (among other things) to reflect its context. With hundreds of pieces in storage and lots to do with them, it is not hard to imagine various creative possibilities.
“[REDO] is an initiative where we take all that stuff and promote these over something already made,” she adds, pointing out that this is a key part of Wellmade’s ethos. Using high quality materials already assembled to create new work is a way for the firm to highlight the craft of the artisans they work with, for example. Also, by highlighting the reality that furniture manufacturing results in off-cuts, unused prototypes, and other dead stock, the firm builds on its ethos of transparency.
But beyond making furniture that combines good craftsmanship, sustainability, support for local talent, and creative reimagination, Wellmade hopes to keep the REDO concept open and ever evolving. “Everything we have done so far is a well-researched ‘guinea pig’ project,” Crichton-Stuart says, and as the project proceeds, they have learned much from their collaborators. Working with artists, for instance, has allowed them to revisit how they work as a furniture firm. As the story of REDO proceeds beyond the show that opened in that converted townhouse in Pasig, there is room for new adventures in craft and art, taking these redone pieces to places where more people can gather and appreciate their beauty.
Ren Aguila is an independent curator, archivist, and researcher based in Quezon City. He has written about arts and culture for several publications, including Art+ and GMA News Online. He is currently preparing to curate shows in late 2024 and 2025. He is interested in culture, memory, religion, and storytelling.
Images courtesy of Wellmade Supply Studio.