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Website: Friday Furniture Co
Instagram: @fridayfurnitureco
My name is Mason Holden, and the business I’m running is called Friday. It’s a home office furniture-making business. I have two products, both are work-from-home desks that are wall-mounted. Basically, everything you want is built into the desk: space for a 27-inch monitor, power management, a phone charger, a webcam, and more. There are two sizes. I’m selling exclusively through my website and marketing on Instagram. Everything is online, direct to the consumer.
I started in August of 2024 and have been slowly ramping up and scaling the business. Right now, I’ve made all the desks myself at NextFab, but the sales demand is much higher than I can produce on my own, so I’m working on finding a manufacturer. In terms of marketing, I’ve kind of paused because I don’t have the capacity to produce right now. Once I fix that, I’ll go back to marketing.
I studied product design engineering, which is basically mechanical engineering and industrial design. I’ve been working professionally as an industrial designer for over 10 years, mostly on consumer products like bike sharing systems, consumer products, furniture, and lighting, but I wasn’t working for myself.
This business is my full-time job. I’m trying to start a work-from-home product brand. I started with a desk because it’s something I wanted for myself. I’ve worked from home since the beginning of 2020, and my wife also works from home. When we lived in NYC and San Francisco, we were sharing a small space, so I was trying to find a compact work-from-home desk, but couldn’t find anything well-designed.
I saw a big opportunity since many people started working from home in 2020 and continue to do so, but the products available aren’t very well designed. I started with desks, and now I’m scaling with just that. We’ll see where it goes – I want to do other products too.
I was working from home for a tech startup making office pods—prefabs around 70 square feet and targeted at remote work from home spaces. The company no longer exists. We made incredibly high-end products, well over $100K to buy, and complicated to install. I had awareness of what a nice work-from-home space could be in terms of features and tech, but I wanted to miniaturize it.
I was shopping for myself for a small or fold-down desk with a similar level of design, but couldn’t find anything close. I felt there was a market for it. In cities like NYC and San Francisco, where the cost of living is really high, people are working from home – maybe not every day – but when they do, they want a nice setup without having space for a full office. They need a high-end, compact work-from-home desk.
I originally designed it for myself, which is basically what the product is now. Once I had it designed and made one, I posted it on Instagram to see where it would go and tried to get design blogs to write about it. With success in PR and desk sales, I decided to make it a business in the summer of 2023.
It wasn’t market-ready when I launched, but once I had initial sales, I could start selling to people. I spent three months from October to December doing that at NextFab, with two orders to fill. That winter, I spent time marketing and got a lot of sales, and then I was trying to catch up. I realized I needed someone else to make them. I had a big backlog of pre-orders and was trying to keep people from getting impatient while figuring out how to produce at scale. I’ve been doing no marketing but still selling a few desks a month.
There are so many hard parts. I’ve never run a business before. I’ve always been a designer working for a company, which is constrained – I got the product brief and designed. That’s a small subset of what you do when you’re running a product-based business. I was learning all of the other stuff as I went along.
I’m at a point now where I need to learn how to delegate. Every aspect is just me by myself, and there’s a limit to how far you can take that. I’m trying to make operations not solely dependent on me, so if I’m sick or want to go on vacation, it doesn’t stop everything. I don’t want to burn out.
I came up with it early on. I was thinking about the work-from-home culture. Most people work from home on Fridays, at least. Friday was a better name than Monday, since people don’t like Mondays, and there’s already project management software called Monday. There is a furniture store in West Virginia called Friday, but there’s enough distinction. It’s a day people like, and not many others are using the name.
In the next year, I want to sell 100 desks. My goal for 2024 was 25, and I’d already hit that before the end of the year. That’s my sales goal, so everything is based around that, including finding a manufacturer who can handle that volume.
More generally, another goal is to become better at running a business and learn how to delegate tasks so I can scale the business without being the sole responsible party. I want to focus on what I’m good at and like doing. If I’m doing designer furniture, scaling depends on the price point. If I want to grow the business, I could charge more, but I don’t want to do that. I’m coming from a consumer product background, so I want to make it accessible, which means I need to mass-produce. I’ve arrived at a price point that I like, so I’ll figure out how to make that work.
Specifically for furniture design, Alvar Aalto and Eames are known for their molded plywood and design aesthetic. I like listening to an entrepreneurship podcast called How I Built This, which features origin stories of people’s businesses, usually big brands, and the process of how they got to where they are now.
One thing that’s quite difficult with selling through e-commerce and social media is that I don’t ever really interact with the people buying the products. It’s rewarding to hear from people who are really happy with the desk. Not hearing anything is good, but it’s nice when people take the time to tell me how happy they are.
Just having people buy something you’re making is great. When I first started, I thought people would tell me nice things but not necessarily buy, especially people I don’t even know.
The work-from-home furniture area is unique. All these big brands, like Herman Miller, have been providers of office furniture for decades. When work-from-home became a set-in trend, those brands just took what they were already selling and called it work-from-home. They didn’t change anything, just the marketing. I don’t think that’s the right move. Home is a different environment from a corporate office, so there are different considerations.
The majority of work-from-home people aren’t working in a dedicated home office. They’re in a kitchen, living room, bedroom, or multi-purpose space. When using it as an office, they want it to be well-equipped, but when it’s a bedroom, they want the office to go away. Nobody wants to sleep in an office. They want it to be distinct, so that’s where the folding aspect came in.
It’s space-saving, but also promotes work-life balance. When you’re not working, and it’s sitting out, you’re never really switched off. There’s a distinction when working in an office, but when working from home, that distinction doesn’t exist, so I make furniture that fosters that.
Other companies don’t have a webcam or lighting. My desk has a ring light, a 4K webcam, and a MagSafe phone charger. The materials other companies use are white plastic or cubicle felt. People want furniture that fits the style of their home.
It’s a wooden product made from birch plywood, all cut on CNC. Then, to make the molded parts, I have molds. There are various assembly steps. I’m very heavily biased toward CNC because I’m setting this up as an industrial-sized product, and CNC is automated. This is not fine woodworking – it’s meant to be mass-produced, and CNC is used in industrial settings.
It depends on your aspirations. I was a maker for many years, making things for my own use as a hobby. I made a lot of furniture in my house myself because it’s fun. The first thing is that you don’t need to monetize your hobbies. You can always make stuff for fun, and that’s it.
When making stuff becomes your job, that can also be problematic. I love being in a workshop, but by doing my own manufacturing, I turned into a one-person factory, which isn’t that fun. Ask yourself: are you a maker who wants to sell your things or not?
There are two sides to that. On the technical side, it’s basically a well-equipped workshop space that you can access for not a huge amount of money. If you’re just starting out and need those tools, it would be very expensive to buy them yourself, so having that as a resource is great.
On the personal side, it’s really nice that they have a community and environment where there are other people working on creative businesses. I’m in an environment with other people doing similar things. I hadn’t had much personal interaction with people since I was living in the suburbs, but now I can. Being around a creative community of other people doing similar things at a similar scale is helpful- it’s inspiring, and some people ask practical questions. There’s a networking element to it. The staff are really nice. It has a good atmosphere that’s facilitated by the staff.
Specifically, I’m trying to get a manufacturer to build inventory so I can start selling again and build on the momentum I already have. I kind of stalled. I was doing social media but haven’t posted recently, so I’m trying to go back into that and do more marketing and design to grow sales of the products I have and work on new products.
I now have a space to work from. I got a studio space with the Artisan Accelerator program, and at least one person working with me part-time who helps with fabrications. I want a sales and marketing type co-founder or employee.
I’ve been a NextFab member for about two years. I was aware of the programming they do and attended a two or three-day seminar in the Spring. About 10 years ago, I did a similar program with a business I was trying to start and got a lot out of it. I wanted to revisit having a business and liked the structured learning environment I had in that program.
The NextFab staff told me about the Artisan Accelerator program, which has a structured learning environment. Being around other people trying to start businesses, plus having studio space, was a perk.
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