On June 15, 2026, we sent our first purchase order to Indonesia.
The order included thrones in custom colors with Michael’s design upgrades, ten-foot velvet sofas, teak swings, hand-carved standing crosses, and Halloween thrones.
We had apparently decided to enter the furniture business with everything except a small, manageable order.
We were fifty-fifty partners, with different strengths and plenty of work for both of us.
Michael is a design, marketing, and logistics savant. Give him a product and he’ll improve it, find its audience, and work out how to move it across an ocean. Somewhere in that process, he will also have six more ideas.
Philip handles operations, including the ongoing assignment of keeping Michael pointed toward the idea we are currently paying for.
The first order gave us plenty to work with. The thrones received custom colors and Michael’s design upgrades. ChesterHaus had ten-foot velvet sofas coming, because sometimes a sofa should require its own transportation strategy. We ordered hand-carved standing crosses and teak swings for IndoAkar, our outdoor living brand.
IndoAkar brought Philip’s outdoor construction background into the mix. He had spent years building places where people could sit outside and enjoy themselves. Supplying something worth sitting on seemed like a sensible next step.
The Halloween thrones were a chance to test the market with something fun and substantial. We wanted pieces that could hold their own in October, which was approaching faster than our shipping arrangements.
We had a broker through Michael’s New York operations, and Michael began putting his logistics experience to work. The shipping quote came back higher than expected, with a ninety-day shipping estimate instead of the typical forty-five.
Twice the time and more money gave us something to discuss.
The container also had to land in Savannah, Georgia. That route was our only option for getting a supply chain moving in time for Halloween.
Our warehouse was in Houston, and Georgia remained inconveniently east of Texas.
Michael worked on the supply-chain plan while Philip prepared the warehouse and established the banking. With Michael based in New York, the products coming from Indonesia, and Philip in Texas, there was plenty to coordinate.
Naturally, we also started MorFurn, our everyday furniture business. That added another brand and another set of decisions to an already full schedule.
The warehouse came with a two-ton crane. This was useful equipment, although its first notable contribution to the story was helping us manufacture a completely unnecessary emergency.
We staged a picture to look as though someone was hanging from the crane, then had ChatGPT make it appear they were up at the twenty-foot ceiling.
For the record, this was person number three on the crane. The details are private. Even this blog has a discretion policy, apparently.
The result showed promise, so we added firefighters for the follow-up picture. We now had a rescue operation, no actual emergency, and two business owners getting considerably less done for a few minutes.
We found this deeply entertaining.
Eventually, we returned to the orders, designs, warehouse preparations, and banking. We worked around the distance between New York and Houston and found another way forward whenever something became complicated.
Michael could turn a conversation about one product into plans for an entire collection. Philip could usually bring him back to the original product before the collection needed its own warehouse.
Our first shipment left Indonesia on June 26. These were our selections, our designs, our money, and our decisions. Soon they would take up a substantial amount of floor space.
First, they had to cross an ocean.
We had furniture coming, Halloween approaching, and a container headed for Savannah. Getting it back to Texas would become a story of its own.
At this point, we still thought of that as a logistics problem.
