80. How a £5,000 Workshop Became a Global Luxury Furniture Brand | Tom Faulkner
5/25/20261 hr 9 min
What does it take to build a luxury brand by accident and keep it thriving for 30 years without ever taking outside investment?
In this episode of All About Business, James speaks with Tom Faulkner, award-winning British furniture designer and founder of Tom Faulkner Limited. They talk about the unlikely journey from redundancy at a record label to running one of the UK's most distinctive handcrafted furniture brands, with showrooms in London and New York, and a workshop in Swindon that has been making things by hand since 1996.
Tom shares the story of how a side...
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First 90 secondsJames Reed· Host0:00
Welcome to All About Business. With me, James Reed, the podcast that covers everything about business, management, and leadership. Every episode, I sit down with different guests of bootstrap companies, masterminded investment models, or built a business empire. They're leaders in their field, and they're here to give you top insights and actionable advice so that you can apply their ideas to your own career or business venture. What happens when losing your job unexpectedly leads to building a global design business? Today on All About Business, I'm joined by Tom Faulkner, whose company started in the early 1990s making hand-painted tables, and has since evolved into an internationally recognized luxury furniture brand. In this episode, we discuss how the business began by accident, the role of craft in a modern design company, and how a workshop in Swindon came to serve a global market. Well, today on All About Business, I'm really delighted to welcome Tom Faulkner. Um, Tom is an award-winning British furniture designer and the founder of Tom Faulkner Limited, which is renowned for creating distinctive, handcrafted, sculptural luxury furniture. Um, Tom has two showrooms, one in London and one in New York, and he has a fabrication center workshop, I should call it, in Swindon, Wiltshire. So Tom, you're London, New York, Swindon,