283: From Craft to Manufacturing: How Crafted Glory’s Kwadwo Som-Pimpong Is Scaling a Furniture Business While Working the Night Shift

About this episode

Kwadwo Som-Pimpong discusses his journey from making furniture out of necessity to running a successful luxury furniture brand while balancing a full-time job.

Kwadwo Som-Pimpong started making furniture in 2015 because he bought a house with no furniture and decided to build his own. A decade later, he runs Crafted Glory, a small-batch luxury furniture brand blending West African artistry with Scandinavian design, while working 10-hour shifts at Eaton as a fabrication supervisor. In this episode, Chris sits down with Kwadwo to trace the journey from those first end tables built in a garage to a full-scale business. The conversation covers how Kwadwo manages the constraints of four to five hours in the shop each day, including three strategies he has put in place, a clipboard for tracking time and tasks, using Claude to reflect and connect the dots on the 40-minute drive home, and a networking story from New York that turned one photo on Instagram into a series of interior design projects. He also walks through the Echoes of the Forest project, two pieces made from trees uprooted by Hurricane Helene, one already installed in Biltmore Forest Town Hall and one headed for Asheville’s historic YMI Cultural Center. In this episode, find out: How Kwadwo got into furniture making in 2015 out of necessity, moving into a house with no furniture…

People in this episode

Host: Chris Luecke

Guest: Kwadwo Som-Pimpong

Topics covered

• furniture making
• entrepreneurship
• work-life balance
• design
• manufacturing

Keywords

• furniture
• Crafted Glory
• Kwadwo Som-Pimpong
• manufacturing
• design
• entrepreneurship
• Hurricane Helene

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Crafted Glory, Eaton, Hellman Chang

Places: Biltmore Forest Town Hall, Asheville, New York, Carnegie Mellon

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