We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Chris and Laura Panjwani . We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Chris and Laura below.
Alright, so we’re so thrilled to have Chris and Laura with us today – welcome and maybe we can jump right into it with a question about one of your qualities that we most admire. How did you develop your work ethic? Where do you think you get it from?
When we started Contemporary Craftsman we both had full time jobs and were expecting our first child. Life was already busy. Now we have two kids and life is even busier. But for us, this business is truly a passion. We own Amish furniture, we support American products, and we are really committed to giving people more options than just buying mass produced furniture made overseas. I want this business to succeed because I do feel we are providing real value to people.
Our customers also keep me motivated. Because this is such a long-term purchase most of our customers end up calling us. I really enjoying talking to each of them and hearing their life stories. Furniture is such a personal purchase and so many people share a lot with me, sending me pictures of their homes, telling me about their growing families, their jobs, their marriages, their retirement plans and why they are making a big move across the country, I love helping Grandparents find that perfect table that will fit all their kids and grandkids, and helping couples buy their first bedroom set together. Their excitement when their receive their furniture keeps me motivated.
Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?
We own Contemporary Craftsman Furniture, an e-commerce store that offers heirloom quality, 100% solid wood, Amish furniture that you can customize and purchase from the comfort of your own home.
We are passionate about Amish furniture because it is made in America from locally sourced materials and sustainably harvested woods. It’s also built without the use of any artificial wood substitutes, so it’s a safer and more environmentally and family friendly furniture option than what you find in most big box stores and online.
The Amish have been handcrafting solid wood furniture for centuries. They build for durability as well as beauty, utilizing only the best materials and assembling techniques that assure each piece will last forever. But many people don’t have access to Amish-crafted furniture unless they happen to live near where the Amish are based in PA, Ohio, or Indiana.
Our goal is to make buying handcrafted solid wood furniture simple and accessible to people nationwide. We’ve created a simple online furniture shopping experience that makes buying easy. After browsing our many dining, bedroom, office, or living room options, customers can select their design and then customize everything in minutes.
For example when buying a table, a customer would simply pick their design, select their wood type (oak, maple, cherry, elm, walnut ect.), select the size of the table, add any leaves they wanted, and then select which of our many stain options they’d like. The price is calculated right there and customers can even see a preview of what their furniture looks like in some of our more popular stain colors. We also offer stain and upholstery samples so customers can see our materials in person before making their final selections.
Once an order is completed online, we send it directly to our crafters to create. After about 8-14 weeks depending on the piece, the furniture is delivered directly to our customer’s homes where everything is assembled and set up by our shipping partners. We are in constant communicate with our customers throughout the entire process to answer any questions and provide any clarification needed. Each piece is built for each individual customer, so it’s easy for us to grant special requests to make sure that our customers get exactly what they are looking for.
In addition to our easy online shopping experience, what also makes us different from other furniture retailers, especially other Amish furniture retailers, is that we’ve worked hard to curate a collection that is contemporary, yet timeless.
When many people think of Amish furniture, they think of traditional design—simple rectangular shapes without much flair or ornamentation, typically created in oak and stained in red and golden-brown hues. But many of today’s Amish crafters aren’t living in the past when it comes to design. They are building contemporary furniture with modern shapes and bold embellishments. They are utilizing metal and leather alongside a wide variety of beautiful American hardwoods, available in stains ranging from vibrant teals and blues and muted tans and grays and everything in between. We’ve connected with the Amish crafters that take a more modern approach so that our customers don’t have to choose between quality and style when they are shopping for furniture. We don’t put anything on our website that we don’t love, in fact, we actually have many of the pieces in our own home!
If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
1) Flexibility: Be OK with sunk time and changing direction when starting anything new. What I mean by that is just because you’ve spent a lot of time on something doesn’t mean you have to keep going in that direction if it’s not working. When we first started building the website we tried a lot of different approaches to create the best user experience. And overtime, we realized that some of them just didn’t work. So we had to go back to square one and try something else. At first, I was hesitant to make big changes because I had spent so much time going in one direction and I didn’t want that time to be wasted. But ultimately if you keep going in a direction that just isn’t working you won’t by happy with the final product and you will eventually waste even more time redoing it later.
2) Confidence: If you want to do something and you believe in it, go for it, even if you don’t have a lot of support. When we first started this business a lot of people thought we were crazy. E-commerce furniture is a competitive space and a lot of people thought I was wasting my time and money on something that would never become a profitable business. And it did take time and a lot of investment before we started making a profit. But I kept at it because I really believed in this idea and I am really proud that I did.
3) Willingness to Learn: I think it is super important not to just stay in your comfort zone. What really helped us take this business to the next level was stepping outside of my wheelhouse and learning everything I could about marketing online. This is not an area I had any experience in before starting this business, but I learned quickly that even if you have an amazing website with really good products and great customer service none of it matters if no one ever finds your website. Online marketing is a complicated space where you can easily waste a lot of money if you don’t know what you are doing. And at first we did lose money. So I read everything I could, talked to a lot of experts and other small business owners and tried a lot of different things. I am still not perfect but I have been able to learn enough to really get our website in front of not just a lot of people, but the right people who are actually interested in what we are selling. I took a chance and learned a new skill and now it is really paying off.
What’s been one of your main areas of growth this year?
The last 12 months have really been huge for us. We have grown the business 10 fold to where we were a year ago. We’ve been able to accomplish that by really tailoring our online marketing strategy, connecting with more crafters to curate the best collection of furniture we can, and learning the right skills and partnering with the right people to help us improve our website experience. I’m excited to see where we are in 12 more months.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://contemporary-craftsman.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/contemporarycraftsman/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/contemporarycraftsman
