What's the Trouble with Today's Furniture Industry?
Furniture, like a house, land or good recipes, used to be passed down from generation to generation. Furniture used to be considered an heirloom. However, in step with the world’s tendency towards globalization, furniture is nowadays considered a vulgar consumer good. The furniture industry, too, has fallen to the woes of offshoring: work is often sent to less regulated countries, where labourers’ rights (and more importantly, basic human rights) are often disregarded. Simultaneously, our tastes have evolved: not only is auntie’s furniture not in style anymore, but the need to refresh our surroundings has reached unprecedented frequency, not unlike the phenomena of fast fashion.
Of course, garments are a lot lighter than furniture and yet the clothing industry is one of the most polluting in the world. With cheap brands becoming ubiquitous and styles changing ever faster, many, including those selling clothing, see it as a disposable good. Furthermore, cheap clothes aren’t made to be reusable and so don’t last very long. Ultimately, fabric is hardly recyclable at all. Everything considered, it’s easy to imagine the environmental damage that the fast fashion business model could do if applied to the furniture industry. And guess what, the transition towards “fast-furniture” has already started thanks to white-labeling.
Indeed, selling white-labelled furniture has become common practice for almost every major furniture outlet. What this means is that stores, be they physical or online, buy unbranded furniture from obscure manufacturers, which they go on to sell as their own (like, say, IKEA or ZUOmodern). Instead of marking it as their own, some businesses will sell their white-labeled furniture under a made-up brand like "Toronto’s Finest", "Langley Street", "Wade Logan" and so on. Needless to say, the quality of these white-label items often leaves room for improvement… Not to mention the poor ethical quality of these products, considering the undoubtedly miserable conditions in which human beings made these things. The trouble with white-labeling is that it makes it very difficult for purchasers to have any idea of what they’re buying. Manufacturing location is undisclosed, material lists are only partial or incorrect, and you’ll almost never find a decent website, let alone one with the information you’re looking for. Actually, the amount of disclosed information is an excellent way of finding out if what you plan on purchasing is white-label or not: can’t find any info on the materials or on the factory whereabouts? Probably a white-label you should avoid. All in all, what fast-fashion creates is an ever-faster cycle of consumption (including discarding), a process that ultimately generates heaps of waste. Even then, using the term “cycle” is generous in this case, because it implies a closed loop where basic materials could be reused, or returned to nature through organic processes. This, as we’ve seen, is not the case. Everything considered, the clothing industry is our best argument against the practice of white labeling in the furniture industry.
As consumers, we must make manufacturers and retailers responsible for the products they create and sell by asking the right questions and demanding alternatives to these very poor industry standards. Where was this made? In what working conditions? What kind of glues where used? What kind of dyes where used? Where any other chemicals such as flame retardants used? Are the materials reclaimed or can they be reclaimed? Etc.