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Business Profile: Arbor Exchange
Business Aug 24, 2016
- Courtesy photo
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Although Jackson says he enjoys building dining tables the most, Arbor Exchange can change the dynamic of just about any room in your house with an heirloom-quality piece. – Courtesy photo
By Gus Herrera
It’s a good thing that Josh Jackson became bored with his previous job, which kept him sitting in front of a computer for most of the day. It’s also a good thing that Jackson read Matthew Crawford’s “Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work.” Without these prerequisites, the Arbor Exchange, Pasadena’s number one studio for locally-sourced, affordable, heirloom-quality furniture would never have come to fruition.
Jackson moved to Pasadena with his wife in 2005 – five years and one epiphany later, Jackson and a close friend co-founded the furniture design workshop, to be known as Arbor Exchange.
An entrepreneur, seemingly fed up with the stagnant office lifestyle, Jackson found inspiration in the “Shop Class as Soulcraft,” a motorcycle mechanic’s philosophical discourses, which emphasize the hidden beauty, complexity, challenges, and pleasures of working with one’s hands. “I was totally shaped by that book – it got me out of my computer days and into the shop,” reveals Jackson. “It changed my whole paradigm to see manual work as this beautiful work that involved art and actually was just as complex and complicated, and required a lot of intellect in the same way that a white-collar job would.”
Armed with newfound inspiration, Jackson’s next step was to sharpen his existing skills/knowledge he accrued spending countless hours building with his grandfather, a carpenter by trade. He travelled to Northern California to learn under woodworking instructor and master craftsman David Marks, known for his television show “Woodworks.”
– Courtesy photo
In 2012 Jackson finally quit his office job, successfully trading in his desk and computer for power tools and workbench. Since then, Arbor Exchange has effectively filled the vast gap between IKEA and pricier furniture establishments. “We launched Arbor with the goal of making really good quality furniture but at a better price than the big guns out there who have to include retail space and tons of overhead into the price … we hardly have any high-end clients – most of them are young families, middle-income who just want to have a really beautiful table or bed that they can call their best piece of furniture. This is who I want to work for,” says Jackson.
Arbor Exchange’s character can be boiled down into two points of emphasis: sustainability and heirloom-quality.
Every piece of wood is hand-picked locally and all slabs are sourced from naturally-fallen or diseased trees that would otherwise be chopped down into firewood. As far as dimensional wood goes, Jackson frequents a downtown LA lumber yard, meticulously curating his wood selection, “I’ll sit there for half a day and hand-pick every single board that goes into a project.”
Jackson uses strictly domestic wood from sustainably-harvested forests. He avoids anything exotic/tropical that he is not 100 percent of sure where it came from or how the trees came down.
Arbor Exchange also uses reclaimed wood, all from LA County – using reclaimed wood, most of which is salvaged from old buildings, breathes new life into wood that would otherwise end up contributing to landfills. Even the metal is locally-sourced at Arbor Exchange, Jackson has a go-to fabricator right here in Pasadena.
– Courtesy photo
With a vast selection of woods to choose from, a customer’s piece is only limited by their creativity and the space their residence allows. The result: almost every piece Arbor Exchange produces is inherently unique. Furthermore, Jackson loves the collaboration aspect of his trade, “that’s what makes what we do so fun – we’re actually collaborating with the client to design something that fits not only their aesthetic but their space.”
The attention-to-detail and level of thought that goes into the acquisition of Arbor Exchange’s raw materials carries over to the high-quality Jackson maintains in the execution of his design and constructions, “The number one part of my business is building something that is going to last forever. We build stuff to last … a lot of work, experience, and time is required to get it done right, but certainly the most important part of the job is getting stuff out of my studio that is not only beautiful, but lasts a long time.”
Jackson reveals that his business is more or less split 50/50 between residential and retail/commercial clients. You can see Arbor Exchange’s work in local spots such as Old Town’s King’s Row Gastropub and Café 86, or more famous destinations, such as Disneyland.
– Courtesy photo
For the individual customer, Arbor Exchange can furnish just about every room in your home. For the bedroom: bed frames, headboards, and side tables. For the living room/office: coffee tables, bookshelves, case goods, desks, and more. Last, but certainly not least, Arbor Exchange makes beautiful, one-of-a-kind tables (dining and conference).
When asked what his favorite item to build is, Jackson was quick to respond: “My absolute favorite thing to build is a dining table for a family. I have three kids, a young family, and it’s true, the dining table is totally the centerpiece of the house … it’s where the family gathers on a daily basis – for homework, for meals. To provide a family with a beautiful piece of wood that they’re literally going to have, hopefully, for the rest of their lives … there’s nothing better than that.”
For more information, visit www.ArborExchange.com or call (626) 376-7434.
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