Meet Susan Pilato

We recently connected with Susan Pilato and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Susan, appreciate you sitting with us today to share your wisdom with our readers. So, let’s start with resilience – where do you get your resilience from?

Resilience is developed over time and experience; however, it takes confidence and surrounding oneself with people who will stand with you in difficult times. I learned early on about resilience when at 13 years old my mother passed away from breast cancer. Both my sister and brother had their own families and had moved on with their lives. My father and I were left to carry on together. We learned together how to cook, do laundry without shrinking all of our clothes and to fill the house with love without Mom. We had family and friends that were alongside us through the hard days and good days. This experience taught me that with supportive friends and family, there is nothing that I cannot accomplish. This remains true today with my family, friends and coworkers – not to mention my steadfast business partner of thirty plus years.

Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?

My career has been anchored in commercial interior design, which is why I own a design/furniture dealership called PC&A Business Environments as well as a solid wood commercial furniture manufacturing company called Mantra Inspired Furniture. Mantra came about due to a need from a client who was standardized on solid wood furniture made by Harden. When Harden closed their doors in 2016- we immediately looked for another manufacturer of solid wood furniture and found none in the commercial furniture industry. After we learned that our industry had gone to cheaper materials, we looked to the Amish to create the furniture for our client. We discovered how to design furniture with solid wood and Mantra was born. Discovering that much of the marketing of the cheaper materials involved green washing of their sustainability messaging, we decided to lean into educating the commercial architecture and design community about the truth in hardwoods and sustainability. It has not been easy as there has been much mistruths instilled in our industry about forest management and hardwood harvesting. The truth is that we have 2.5 times more forest hardwood than we are removing due to the lack of demand. This leads to less and less managed forests, which leads to wild fires, disease and insect infestation.

We believe that longevity of product is an important part of sustainability and is how we design our furniture. We also understand the importance of diversity and lead by example by the makeup of our staff. In fact, we are excited about our upcoming product launch of our Profile Table Series. Connecting humanity with hardwood, the Profile Table Series is a collection of solid wood tables designed with a person’s profile integrated in the table base. Each piece features just three components—crafted from walnut, white oak, ash, cherry, or maple—with a distinctive human silhouette integrated into the base.

This revolutionary design solves multiple sustainability challenges. The flat-pack format dramatically reduces shipping volume and transportation emissions, while the simple two-piece base assembly eliminates complex hardware and reduces installation costs.

Responsibly sourced American hardwoods ensure each table supports forest preservation and biodiversity while storing carbon throughout its lifecycle. The Profile Table Series embodies circular economy principles—easy to assemble, disassemble, transport, refinish, and reconfigure as needs change.

The human profile celebrated in the design creates spaces that inspire collaboration and connection. Built to last generations, these tables prove sustainability can be both beautiful and practical.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

Curiosity, listening to your soul, and confidence even when you do not feel confident.

Curiosity will guide you to asking questions so that you may learn. All situations, bad or good, have valuable lessons that you can rely upon in the future. Always be eager to learn. No matter how much experience we have or how old we are we can always continue to learn.

Your soul will guide you in the right direction, if you allow it to. Listen carefully to your heart and beware of falling prey to your ego.

Confidence comes with experience; however, rely upon your inner soul’s confidence to get you through the times that you do not feel confident. You will be okay, but also beware of arrogance. Arrogance is bred from the ego and does not provide authentic confidence.

Fight forward and not back. There will be times that others may want to hurt your efforts towards success. Do not be afraid to pivot and move away from those people. That’s how you can fight forward.

What is the number one obstacle or challenge you are currently facing and what are you doing to try to resolve or overcome this challenge?

The number one obstacle we are facing currently is bringing the education of the truth about our North American Hardwood forests and the way they are responsibly harvested to the commercial architecture and design community. There has been so much fear instilled in designers about the use of wood being harmful to forests. This simply has been blown out of proportion, and we are now loving our forests literally to death. In North America – our harvesters do a great job of selective harvesting our hardwood forests so that they can thrive and replenish in a healthy fashion. Without the appropriate demand, we continue to lose sawmills in this country each month and with those losses we lose the caretakers of our forestland. We have teamed up with other architects, designers and hardwood associations to spread the truth about the crisis in the hardwood industry.

I am personally passionate about forests and their role in Mother Nature. We must understand how we can be part of the solution and stop being part of the problem. Through Mantra Inspired Furniture, we are showing firsthand how we can use hardwood in furniture sustainably and responsibly.

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Image Credits

For headshot: Photo by David Uhrin courtesy of COVABIZ magazine

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