Portland Maker Series: Folk Furniture

Frustrated by the overabundance of cheap disposable products, Richard Koehler started Folk, a Portland-based company that responsibly builds furniture, lighting, and goods that will last a lifetime. We sat down to chat with Richard to learn more about his company’s values.

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Richard Koehler

What is your background?

I’ve been building stuff since I was a little kid. Treehouses and guitars, all kinds of stuff. I was always very curious with how things were made. That led me into studying product design at the University of Oregon. I found myself in the metal shop, woodshop, playing with ceramics and really getting to understand all the processes involved with manufacturing by seeing machining, laser cutting, and slip casting for ceramics.

My curiosity is what drove my education and learning all about different materials and processes. That led me into doing commercial building out of college, so I was working on high-end restaurants, bars, and retail spaces in Portland. Those projects are very custom, so you’re constantly creating different furniture, lighting, and fixtures while incorporating a lot of different materials and processes.

Then I went down to Southern Oregon and built a brewery from the ground up. That was a a full building, but on the inside there were a lot of fixtures and furniture that were built by me.

When and why did you start Folk?

Folk had been marinating in my mind for years leading up to when we officially launched about a year ago. I took all this knowledge of learning how to build things and started Folk. We do furniture, lighting and goods — basically everything in your house. We don’t cut corners on materials, we’re the crossroads of modern manufacturing technologies and traditional craftsmanship. We use the highest quality materials, but also try to utilize modern manufacturing.

We work with sustainably harvested, FSC-certified domestic hardwoods, solid steel, casted bronze, natural tanned leather, and raw clay meaning many times we leave it unglazed. Our wood is just oiled, our steel will just have a clear powder coat, so everything is protected but in its purest form. We typically work with walnut, cherry, and ash. We try to source as sustainably as possible.

Tell us about the manifesto on your site.

Before I ever fully launched Folk, the manifesto is just these little snippets I’ve gathered throughout my life. They are sayings that are really important to me. 

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Folk’s manifesto. 

What is your work space like?

Folk is inside a warehouse in industrial northwest Portland, and we work out of a 10,000 square-foot facility, and we use about 2,000 square feet of that space. We share tools with another company in this space. We’ve got all kinds of woodworking tools everywhere, and all the machines we need to make all the products. It’s all made right here in Portland.

We have a full production facility where we make everything and then we also partner with other people in Portland like a metal fabrication team, upholstery we work with someone, and for ceramic parts we work with someone too, but it’s a very close partnership. The community of people we use is our team. The design still comes from Folk, and we still build it all, but for instance the steel parts aren’t made in-house — we’ll send them shop drawings and they will build it for us.

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Folk’s stools are a popular part of their furniture category.

Visit Folk, here.