Process

It is easier to get a visa abroad with trade skills than it is with a degree. It’s a real skill and respected profession.
In the craft skill of your choice, apprentices are immediately be set to design and make real commercial products. Meaning you leave with these skills and comfortably make a living.
At FRIENDS, not only do we teach for free, we pay new makers to learn as an apprentice at 2x the minimum wage.

Our furniture are all made with traditional mortise tenons, dovetails, and their variations. Wood joinery distributes stress and load, and utilises wood movement to create tension in joints. This creates possibilities in far more durable and elegant furniture designs.
By hand and by eye, we reintroduce soul and sensitivity into manufacturing. Every piece is made one at a time. The human moves in relation to the object.
All our products are designed to be constructed with the bare essentials of tools. Why?
We believe that knowledge and skills are to be shared. By designing in an accessible way, everything we build is “open source”.
In the long run, we hope this sharing of ideas will facilitate rebuilding a vibrant and powerful community of Malaysian craftpeople and artists.
By sticking to basic tools, we keep the means to production accessible to anyone. This creates bargaining power for workers who are always free to leave the cooperative. Meaning the cooperative is always in service of workers, not the other way around.

Malaysia is home to some of the world’s best woods. We only use FSC and PEFC-certified local hardwoods, while avoiding popular but critically-endangered woods, such as Chengal or Belian
Wood is not homogenous, and different parts of the tree matters. Every component of our furniture is selected by hand to bring to life the most appropriate and conscientious use of each board.

All our woods are naturally air dried or kiln dried with no additional preservative treatments. We only use safe natural finishes such as tung oil and beeswax.

Treated woods and plywoods release harmful fumes in your home throughout your furniture’s lifetime. While petroleum based finishes such as polyurethane contribute to microplastics.
In the corporate environmental movement’s fixation on carbon neutrality, waste reduction has largely fallen to the wayside.
Although we build our pieces for life, we understand that all good things come to an end. Our products are 100% organic and rich for the earth, meaning at the end of your furniture piece’s service life, you can rest assure it will decompose cleanly even in a landfill.

We prioritise longevity, meaning our process harmoniously connects tree species, grain selection, structural design, and joinery method to produce furniture that lasts a lifetime.
Our pieces may be durable, but not invincible. The greatest insurance for our works is that they are all designed to be easily repairable. Luxury is having repairable products.
Shoot us a message, and we will arrange a repair.

To append Justice to the environmental movement means we must account for class. This is why workers are paid fairly while we sell our products at cost price. This is how our price point for solid wood furniture can match IKEAS.

Furthermore, we continue to experiment on designs that makes lean use of material, choosing to create production processes that are skill intensive rather than materially intensive. We hope to continue making high quality furniture affordable.
Beginning in 2024, we plan to begin succession plant seedlings to restore slow-growth forestry. For the trees we use in our conservation-oriented designs, one single tree can create hundreds of pieces of furniture.
We are currently seeking partnerships and expertise in this area. Please reach out.