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Meet Donna Halloran of Pure Upholstery in Sudbury

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Today we’d like to introduce you to Donna Halloran.

So, before we jump into specific questions about the business, why don’t you give us some details about you and your story.
I have worked in the textile industry my entire life. Certainly my adult life, but I have been consumed with textiles seemingly forever. I learned to sew at a young age and made lots of my own clothing and soft home furnishings. My high school and college year’s jobs were in textiles. I worked with conventional textiles for twenty years of my adult life. I wasn’t aware of any textiles that weren’t processed without a plethora of chemicals. I, frankly, didn’t consider which chemicals were used when I commissioned mills to spin, weave, dye, print or finish fabrics for me. I didn’t think at all about their environmental or physical health impact. I didn’t know that the textile industry is the second largest polluter behind the oil industry. I spent 20 years working for large textile companies in apparel and home furnishings churning out millions of yards of fabric that would be made into all sorts of volume oriented, get the cost down products

I started working with FURNATURE, the only producer of truly non-toxic upholstered furniture in the world at that time, in February 2004. The alliance was serendipitous. I set up a meeting with the company’s founder, Fred Shapiro, to discuss his inventorying and shipping fabric for my on-line fabric business named Fabricadabra. While meeting with him in his huge warehouse, I saw two back rooms with upholstered furniture, mattresses and bedding accessories. I inquired about the contents of the rooms and this is when and where my education in organics home furnishings began. I was fascinated. Furnature began producing these all natural ingredient sofas back in the early 1990’s. Very simple ingredients: solid hardwood frames, natural latex rubber with no additives or harmful flame retardants, untreated wool batting, certified organic cotton muslin, no-VOC leg stains and undyed organic cotton upholstery.

Furnature, was, also, a U.S. distributor of Sleeptek non-toxic mattresses and bedding accessories. The mattresses contained three simple ingredients: natural latex rubber, untreated wool and organic cotton. The bedding accessories shared the same ingredients. Sleeptek was the first manufacturer of organic mattresses in North America.

So, I learned the rather small and evolving organic mattress, bedding accessories, textiles and non-toxic upholstery markets during my four years with Furnature. I sourced suppliers for the natural and non-toxic ingredients, got to work with textile manufacturers who were interested in producing organic cotton upholstery fabrics as well as really grew to understand the values of the consumers who wanted these products back in the early 2000’s. I became one of them. Once you have the knowledge, it is difficult to ignore it.

I used to speak with Leigh Anne, one of the two sisters who founded Oecotextiles, in 2006, before they launched their line. Leigh Anne would phone during the couple years of research that they conducted to ask many questions about what our customers wanted in less toxic natural fiber home textiles fabrics, if any dyes were acceptable at all,…etc. I truly admired all of the thought and research that they put into developing their pioneering line of eco luxurious home furnishings fabrics. Prior to their debut, we were working with a line of color grown organic cottons that had been developed 10 years earlier and were still on the market due to lack of demand along with a canvas dyed hemp that was offered in natural, beige, navy, olive, chocolate and black. Consumers want color and sophistication.

I co-founded EKLA HOME, maker of non-toxic upholstered furniture, in 2008 with Emily Kroll, the owner. Emily had the background in furniture design and I in the non-toxic ingredients, construction, textiles and sourcing. She had written a thorough business plan and was looking for funding. She wanted to change her business model from conventional to organic based on her own value system and lifestyle. She came to Furnature in 2007 to propose that we collaborate and that her factory produce pieces for Furnature on the West Coast. We worked with her and factory for a short period of time until it became apparent that there just wasn’t enough margin and volume to make it feasible. Her designs were fresh and progressive. She already understood the consumer because she was one of them. I knew that we would work well together. So, I left Furnature.

It was a nine year labor of myriad emotions. The launch couldn’t have been at a worse time in the economy other than just before the Great Depression. However, we were lean and optimistic. We immediately embraced Oecotextiles as our upholstery fabric supplier. Customers love the fabrics, weave options, variety of colors and the independent non-toxic certifications. We worked from our homes, had no showroom, held sofa viewings in Skippy’s Coconut Ice Cream’s parking lot a couple Saturdays each month or met customers just off the 5 when we were making Nor Cal deliveries. Most customers took the leap of faith to buy sight unseen.

We encountered many hurdles and many successes. Hurdles: high cost of ingredients, production delays, in-transit damages, expectations that non-toxic fabrics perform like Crypton and Sunbrella, 100% made by human hands, we didn’t offer EKLA HOME PRIME, own our own fleet of trucks and we offered no financing. Successes: all of the awards and recognition from fearless advocates of sustainability and wellness, positive customer feedback. We worked long days and needed to be available on weekends, week nights, vacations and when showering for customers due to deliveries and time zones. We became disheartened by all of the out of pocket expenses that we incurred with in-transit damages that we had to pay to rectify because the shippers wouldn’t honor claims if customers didn’t note the damages on the bills of lading. We had serious labor issues in the factory. Each employee specialized in one aspect of the construction process. If the frame builder had to go back to Central America due to a family event or the cushion maker got sick, production just stopped. Nothing was mechanized. Emily and I were masochists. When I felt frustrated, she would jump in and keep things going and vice versa. We laughed, we cried, it became a part of us. As the owner of the company, Emily was tasked with handling all of the receivables and payables, trying to multiply the loaves. It was a continuous stressor.

Emily decided to close the company in February 2017 to pursue textile waste up cycling. As co-founder of the company and the person who had all of the sourcing and construction knowledge, Emily gave me the rights to continue to produce the EKLA HOME collection. Throughout my years with EKLA HOME, I continued to run Fabricadabra as well as work two days a week at The Organic Mattress in Sudbury MA (www.theorganicmattress.com I continue to produce the pieces at the same factories in North Carolina and Los Angeles with the same non-toxic ingredients through The Organic Mattress,Inc under the brand “Pure Upholstery” (pureupholstery.com). I, also, produce custom pieces local to me so that I can better monitor the production. I plan to be very selective about the custom projects that I take on. One can never charge enough for completely custom. It is building a prototype that will never be made again and guessing the labor hours to perfect it. But, you have to price it prior to going through the exercise.

A little about the custom upholstery business and then let’s add the non-toxic components factor. I have read about a number of start-up companies that are offering custom upholstered furniture at highly competitive prices with fast turnarounds, free shipping and generous return policies. Some want to mirror the fast fashion industry. I detest fast fashion. I am sickened by the speed at which new collections come out, the poor quality of the pieces, the problems with the pieces ending up in landfills, the pollution that the factories emit and the goal of encouraging people to buy cheap , buy synthetic and buy often. This is anathema to my values.

The trend of delivering everything quickly concerns me. Casper can offer same day mattress delivery in certain cities. Kudos. However, unless your cat has urinated on your mattress, don’t you know further in advance if you will be needing a mattress? Casper’s success has spawned many on-line mattress retailers to offer mattresses in a box with quick deliveries, generous satisfaction guarantees and a race to the bottom in pricing. I’m seeing this in custom upholstery. The business model seems unsustainable. Let’s use Greycork as an example. Their goal was to make high quality furniture that assembles in under four minutes at reasonable prices and with a generous return policy if not satisfied. They didn’t expect the returns that they did actually received and they couldn’t maintain the price points that they set as a result.

Many people want mattresses and furniture that can be left curbside when they move because they aren’t investment pieces and they cost more to move than to leave behind. This saddens me because the pieces usually end up in landfills. All of the synthetic ingredients continue to be problematic when incinerated.

People are sometimes frustrated with the high cost of non-toxic upholstered furniture and the lead time to produce. The ingredients are 10 times more expensive than their synthetic counterparts. Natural latex rubber and needle punched wool do cost lots of money. The pieces are not mass produced. They are 100% human made. The pieces are built to last. They are investment pieces. Natural latex rubber will not break down as synthetic foam does, despite odd rumors that circulate that natural rubber breaks down faster. Some consumers assume that the makers of non-toxic upholstery are greedy. This is not accurate. We work on much lower margins than those selling conventional pieces. The ingredients with which we work are very difficult to manipulate, so the labor hours to make are doubled those of conventional sofas. Many furniture craftspeople do not want to make organic sofas because they are very challenging. The fabrics, too, are more difficult to use because they don’t have the resin stabilizers that conventional fabrics do. They cost more money than conventional manmade fiber textiles. Conventional fabrics are toxic. None of us is making tons of money. If we are fortunate, we are able to pay our bills and take a modest salary.

Shipping large, heavy pieces of furniture all over the country is a shit show. The process is complex and time consuming. It is not similar to UPS or FedEx or having a local furniture retailer schedule a delivery. They don’t scan the bar codes every few hours. Often, the sofas are just “in-transit” and the shippers cannot tell customers exactly where their sofas are because they don’t even know. Consumers cannot schedule deliveries for when it is convenient for them. They must take delivery when the shipper is in that geographical region and based on the shipper’s schedule. The shipper might not be back to that region for another month.

I shy away from using the term “white glove delivery” because that implies an extremely high level of service. One can have that if one is willing to pay $1100 to ship an organic sofa. However, for $450, the shipper will offer two delivery people who plunk it down in the room of choice and ask you to sign a legal, binding document entitled a “bill of lading” without explaining that it means that you have signed for your organic sofa as being completely free of damages. Most of the time, it is free of in-transit damages. But, sometimes legs get nicked or the upholstery fabric gets soiled. The pieces are stacked sideways on the trucks to fit more freight in the bed. This isn’t a huge issue with conventional sofas. However, an eco-friendly sofa with natural latex rubber and over constructed frames weighs about 300 lbs. and the rubber will shift downward, contorting the upholstery fabric along the way. So, sometimes when the sofas arrive, they need to be manhandled back into form. Some customers, understandably, are aghast and think that the sofa left our facility looking like this. The organic sofas are so heavy that, on a rare occasion, a shipper will choose to drag the sideways sofa rather than lift it. Maybe he has a hangover or is planning to give his notice. Who knows what possesses one to drag a sofa on the ground sideways. What we do know, however, is that the plastic covering will break open and the upholstery fabric will abrade. Sometimes in-room set up shippers will catch this and advise us of the damage so that it can be repaired before delivery. Sometimes, they actually just try to deliver the sofas with the side panels damaged. So, we are left with a sofa in Podunk North Dakota and a bill of lading that has been signed for as “clean” or without notation of damage and we absorb the expenses to hire an upholstery company to pick up the piece, repair and return it , despite our buying insurance to cover replacement.

One area in which Amazon has never been able to excel is signing on furniture manufacturers to sell on their website because the logistics of shipping large pieces of furniture long distances is a nightmare. Two day PRIME delivery is another impossibility. But, again, I have to ask why one needs a sectional sofa in such a hurry unless the puppy ripped their existing sectional to shreds. And, I hope this never happens because the upholstery fabric and foam are likely toxic. I wouldn’t want my puppy chewing conventional components of upholstered furniture.

In summary, I want to share that I continue the mad mission of producing eco-friendly upholstered furniture through The Organic Mattress under the brand of “Pure Upholstery”. , Inc.in Sudbury, MA. Every piece will be shipped boxed or on pallets to lower the likelihood of in-transit damages from forklifts. They have over 5,000 square feet of showroom space (making them the largest retailer of organic mattresses in the states). We actually have sofas in the showrooms. The store itself is beautiful. The building is the oldest building in the town of Sudbury, dating back to the 1700’s. Sudbury neighbors the towns of Lexington, Lincoln and Concord MA, all three of which are quintessential New England hamlets in the suburbs of Boston. Sudbury’s zip code is 01776. Yes, 1776!!! If a potential customer is visiting Boston, we will gladly coordinate picking them up in Boston to bring them to our showrooms.

The Organic Mattress will deliver all of its own mattresses and upholstered furniture from Portland Maine to New York City, using its own delivery truck and reliable delivery people who have been doing the deliveries since 2007. They wear gloves, remove their shoes, do not wear cologne and they will take away your old mattress or sofa. They then donate them to Household Goods. (https://householdgoods.org/) I will physically be in the showrooms on Tuesdays and Thursdays and am available at any time to wax eco-friendly sofas, organic mattresses and bedding accessories. It’s not my first summer out, as you might have gleaned by now.

We’d love to hear more about your business.
I am most proud of our customer service, our patience, my knowledge of the industry and textiles. We don’t try to sell. We develop relationships. If our products don’t work for a consumer, we find no joy in selling them something that is inappropriate for their needs.

What were you like growing up?
Oh boy, I was a very mischievous, energetic and creative kid. Middle child and left-handed. I truly enjoyed pranks and spinning ridiculous tales. Creative writing, sewing, embroidering, bedazzling and turning items of clothing into other textile items, selling painted rocks to neighbors and throwing my own yard sales at age five were relaxing to me. I was a kid in the 1970’s, so love beads, walking barefoot, gum wrapper jewelry, cotton gauze, family and community where all intertwined. Despite being only single digit years old, the early 1970’s deeply impacted me and my values today.

Based on reactions, I think that I was a likable imp. I was an empathetic kid and didn’t say or do anything intentionally hurtful. I never felt compelled to conform unless the issue at hand worked to my value system. I was one of three girls and we were all 12 months apart. (“Irish triplets” is the phrase.) Relatives seemed to buy us all of the same outfit’s indifferent colors. I would have none of that. My sisters would just acquiesce as if it were no big deal that we were dressed in the same outfits.

In retrospect, I think that I might have had some misguided childhood delusion that I was actually cooler than my sisters. When I was bored, I would just walk the neighborhood and knock on the doors of homes with teenage girls and ask them if they wanted to hang out with 6 year-old me. They usually let me in, granted my request to see their bedrooms and I’d ask if they had any midriff shirts that they had grown out of that they might give to me. Occasionally, they did! Sometimes, I asked them to paint my nails black. My grade school teachers at St. Bridget’s School in Framingham MA would shake their heads disapprovingly when they saw my nails. I, on the other hand, felt proud of my black talons. I thought I was on par with these teenage girls and realized decades later that they were just being sweet to me- over and over again.

I learned to sew so that I could make the amazing clothes that were available in junior sizes but not in Girls’ 7 slim. Landlubber brand was my obsession. (https://vintagefashionguild.org/label-resource/landlubber/).

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