The Slow Build

The first thing Martin Oduya will tell you about Brackwood, the furniture workshop he has run for eleven years, is how long it took to get to twenty people. Not how good the chairs are. Not the waiting list, which currently runs to fourteen months. The number of years, and the number of people, said in the flat tone of a man who has had the conversation before and knows how it usually goes.

It usually goes badly. Eleven years to twenty employees is, by the arithmetic most people bring to a workshop, a failure — a growth rate you would have to squint at to see. Oduya does the arithmetic differently. Twenty people, he says, is the number Brackwood can carry through a bad year without asking any of them to leave. He has tested this twice.

The workshop sits in a converted grain store outside a market town, two floors, a goods lift that predates him and a yard where the timber seasons under a roof he built himself in the third year. Brackwood makes dining chairs, mostly, and the tables that go with them. A chair takes a maker eleven working days. It has taken eleven working days since 2015, which is the fact Oduya considers most important about his company and the one visitors find least interesting.

The offers

He has turned down five approaches that he counts as serious, and he counts them the way other founders count rounds.

The first, in year four, was a retailer that wanted 400 chairs a year at a price that worked only if the eleven days became six. The second was a private buyer who offered to fund a second workshop in exchange for a third of the company; Oduya asked who would train the makers in it and got an answer about hiring. The third was a licensing deal — the design, made elsewhere, his name on the underside. The fourth and fifth, both in the past two years, were funds, and both used the word platform.

He can tell you the terms of each without checking. He can also tell you, unprompted, what each would have paid him, and the number for the licensing deal is large enough that he says it quietly.

This is where the philosophy he calls the slow build actually lives — not in a preference for craft over commerce, which he finds a sentimental way to put it, but in a bottleneck he has decided not to route around. A Brackwood maker takes about six years to become independent on the full chair. Oduya has never hired one who arrived finished, because the people who arrive finished arrive with habits, and unlearning a habit takes longer than learning a skill. So the company grows at the rate it can teach, and the rate it can teach is roughly two apprentices at a time, and two apprentices at a time over eleven years is twenty people.

What it costs

The honest ledger is less romantic than the philosophy. Brackwood turned over £2.4M last year and made a margin Oduya describes as “adequate and boring.” He paid himself less than his senior makers for six of the eleven years and says the two years he did not were the years he liked least, because he noticed he had started thinking about the company as an asset.

The waiting list is not a marketing device. It is a symptom, and one he has tried and failed to cure four times. He will not raise prices to shorten it — he tried, in 2023, and the list got longer, which taught him something about his customers he says he would rather not know. The list means Brackwood turns away work weekly, and the work it turns away goes to people who make chairs in six days.

Three apprentices have left before finishing. Oduya keeps their names in a notebook and calls this the real cost of the slow build: six years is a long time to ask of a twenty-four-year-old, and he cannot promise any of them the workshop will still want them at the end, only that it has never yet not wanted them.

Year twelve

The plan for the next year is a second floor of bench space in the building he already has, and a third apprentice slot, which the senior makers voted on. The vote was not ceremonial. Oduya put it to them because they are the ones who supervise, and they said yes on the condition that the third slot starts in January rather than September, when the current pair will be far enough along to need less.

He is 51. Asked what happens to Brackwood eventually, he said the succession is the apprentices or it is nothing, and that he has watched enough workshops sold to know which of those is likelier. Then he went back to the bench, where a chair leg had been waiting through most of the conversation, and said the part he always says last: that the eleven days are not slow. They are how long it takes.