Mission Statement

Robin Wade Furniture is driven by a desire to celebrate and honor the natural world. We strive to exhibit this celebration and respect in our manufacturing process, and create furniture that encourages and inspires renewed awe and appreciation of nature.

The goals in our mission statement are lofty indeed. It can be difficult to feel a sense of wonder and respect for nature when one works with natural materials every day. Familiarity breeds contempt, as they say. However, those of us who pour our sweat, tears, hearts and souls into this business have never lost our focus. We subscribe to a set of key core values. These values explain why we feel awe, respect and a joyful celebration in each and every piece we create.

At RWF we are constantly seeking out ways to make our business more sustainable. Practicing sustainability is one way we celebrate nature: by taking only what we need, and giving back as much as we take. This not only celebrates nature, but celebrates life in general, ensuring that future generations will be able to feel the same awe and joy in a natural environment that we do today.We take our time, enjoying the journey as much as the finished product.

In our Slow Studio process, a piece of furniture takes time. Still we take our time, ensuring that the piece is made right and made to last. We do not believe in instant gratification. Instead, we enjoy the effort it takes to create a piece of high quality furniture. When you take your time, the process becomes as valuable as the end product.

There are many places in the world that can inspire an appreciation of the beauty of nature. But the first place we always look for appreciation and inspiration is our own backyard. In our determination never to take anything for granted, we begin at home. We celebrate the beauty of the Alabama wilderness and source all our materials for our furniture locally. We often source trees that have been blown down by winds and storms, giving these pieces a new life in someone's home. Why go further when beauty can be found all around you?

At Robin Wade Furniture, we are not just in the business of making furniture. We are making art. We believe that appreciation of beauty is one of the key ways to encourage a feeling of awe and wonder about the natural world. Truly, the world we live in is amazing. When we build artifacts from the raw materials this world provides, we owe it to nature and to ourselves to work as hard as possible to preserve that amazement.

When you purchase a piece from Robin Wade Furniture, there is no veneer to mask inferior products and no stain to hide a wood’s natural grain or color. We let nature speak for itself. In order to respect nature's voice, we must ensure that it has a voice for a long time to come. Our values do not allow for clear cutting of forests, either foreign or domestic. We do not practice importing, which pollutes the earth’s waters, or long-distance trucking, which pollutes our air. What you see—a  locally and conscientiously made piece of furniture—is what you get.

We Cultivate an Environmental Conscience

Last, but certainly not least, Robin Wade Furniture strives to be an environmentally aware company. Our conviction is that we cannot bring nature's beauty into peoples’ homes through the furniture we create if we do so at the expense of nature itself. To do so would be to rob nature of its beauty, and be left only with wooden furniture as hollow reminders of what we once had. We do not want to see our furniture become memorials of a lost wilderness. So, we strive to be a model of ecological thoughtfulness in everything we do.

A Labor of Love

This company is a labor of love as much as it is a business. We don't just mean love of what we do (though we do, of course, love making beautiful furniture) but also a way to demonstrate our love of Alabama and of the natural world to others. These pieces of furniture stand as a testament to the fact that we care deeply about what we do, who and what we affect by doing it, and how we affect them. We hope all of this can be seen in the pieces we create and the process by which we create them. For us, each piece we create is an opportunity to express and confirm our beliefs.