Handmade furniture pricing has gotten complicated with all the “artisan” marketing and “custom made” claims flying around. As someone who builds furniture for a living, I learned everything there is to know about why a handmade table costs what it costs. Today, I will share it all with you.
A customer asked me this once while looking at the price tag on a walnut dining table I’d built. She wasn’t being rude—genuinely curious why this table cost twelve times what a similar-looking one from the furniture store would run.
I gave her the long answer, because it’s actually a reasonable question with an interesting answer.
The Materials Cost More
Factory furniture uses engineered materials—particleboard, MDF, plywood—covered with veneer or laminate. That material costs a fraction of solid hardwood. A sheet of MDF runs maybe forty dollars. The walnut in that dining table ran about eight hundred dollars for the rough lumber alone.
And that’s just the final selection. For every board I used, I probably looked at three or four that had defects, wrong grain patterns, or wouldn’t work for the design. Finding matching boards for a wide tabletop takes time and sometimes means buying more lumber than I end up using.
Quality hardware adds up too. Good drawer slides, solid brass hinges, hand-forged pulls—these cost multiples of what mass manufacturers pay for their stamped commodity hardware.
The Time Is Enormous
Probably should have led with this section, honestly. That dining table took about eighty hours to build. Milling the lumber, joinery, assembly, finishing—it all adds up. At any reasonable hourly rate, labor becomes the largest cost component.
Factory furniture doesn’t require skilled labor for most operations. Machines do the work. A person loads material in, pushes buttons, and stacks output. The skill is in setting up the machines, not operating them.
Handmade furniture requires skilled labor throughout. Every cut, every joint, every finishing decision draws on years of experience. That expertise doesn’t come cheap, and it shouldn’t.
I’ve been doing this for over a decade and I’m still learning. That’s what makes this craft endearing to us woodworkers—the furniture I build now is substantially better than what I built five years ago. That accumulated skill is baked into every piece.
No Economies of Scale
When a factory makes ten thousand chairs, the cost of design, tooling, and setup gets spread across all ten thousand. Each chair absorbs a tiny fraction of those fixed costs.
When I build one dining table, that table absorbs all of the design thinking, all of the setup, all of the problem-solving. Even if I build the same design twice, I’m not getting anywhere near the efficiency that volume production provides.
There’s also no inventory to amortize purchasing power. I buy lumber in small quantities at retail or slightly below. Factories buy container loads at wholesale pricing that I can’t access.
Customization Is Expected
Most clients who buy handmade furniture want something specific. This table needs to fit a particular space, in a particular wood, with particular leg styling. Those customizations are part of the value—you’re getting exactly what you want, not settling for what’s available.
But custom work costs more than production work. Every design decision requires consultation. Every dimension needs verification. Changes happen mid-project. All of this takes time that doesn’t exist in standardized production.
The Quality Is Different
This sounds like marketing speak, but there’s substance behind it. Handmade furniture is built differently than factory furniture.
Joinery in handmade pieces often uses traditional methods—mortise and tenon, dovetails, floating tenons—that are stronger and more durable than the cam locks and dowels in flat-pack furniture. These joints take longer to cut but last for generations.
Finishing is done by hand, with multiple coats, proper curing time between coats, and careful sanding at each stage. Factory finishing happens fast, often with UV-cured coatings that are efficient but less beautiful and less repairable than hand-applied oil or lacquer.
The result is furniture that can be refinished, repaired, and passed down. My grandfather’s desk is still in use three generations later. Your IKEA bookshelf won’t make it that far.
It’s a Different Product
Comparing handmade furniture to factory furniture on price alone misses the point. They’re different products serving different needs.
Factory furniture is fine for many purposes. It’s affordable, functional, and sometimes even attractive. There’s nothing wrong with buying it when it fits your situation.
Handmade furniture is for when you want something specific, made to last, built by someone who cares about the craft. It costs more because it takes more—more material, more time, more skill.
That customer who asked me the question ended up buying the table. She got it. The price reflected the value.
