Room & Board
Bloomberg News | Minneapolis, Minnesota
Room & Board has been making more than 90% of its furniture in the United States since 1980, through partnerships with small domestic manufacturers that most of the industry spent those same decades moving away from. When furniture tariffs started hitting competitors hard in 2025 and brands began scrambling to re-shore production they'd offshored years earlier, Bloomberg came to Minneapolis to write about a company that had never left.
I spent a day at the headquarters documenting the feature. The particular problem with photographing a furniture company for a business publication is that everything is already optimized — the showroom is curated, the products are built to be photographed, the spaces are considered. The job isn't to capture how good it looks. It's to find the people and operational details that tell the business story underneath the aesthetic: the manufacturing relationships, the employee-ownership culture, the forty-five years of decisions that kept production domestic when the economics kept arguing otherwise.