June 18, 2025
Inside Three SoCal Design Workshops Where Craft and Sustainability Meet
The origin stories of design entrepreneurs whose businesses thrive where dedication to craft, efficient production protocol, and sustainable manufacturing practices converge make a strong case for reviving high school shop class programs. The following three founder-owned and -operated SoCal design workshops are forging their own paths guided by a passion for quality goods and client service—as well as the powerful act of making things from start to finish under one roof. While best practices matter at every step of the way, product longevity enables these studios to walk the green-minded talk.
RAD Furniture
It’s an auditory challenge to discern every word Ryan Anderson and Russell Hill share about RAD Furniture as band saws emit a screeching din in its 15,000-square-foot Los Angeles factory. Thankfully, the work speaks for itself. The presence of RAD’s sturdy yet lightweight tables, seating, and stools in public-facing spaces such as Sweetgreen, REI, and Whole Foods locations means certain signature aluminum and colorful powder-coated steel pieces are recognizable and chameleonic. With the ability to scale and customize orders, the work appeals to clients whose high-activity settings demand durability, as well as industry collaborators including Olson Kundig and SALT Landscape Architects.
“We started out designing and building what we knew how to build with readily available materials,” Hill explains. Anderson and Hill met as they were entering the design and architecture fields after finishing their respective master of architecture and undergraduate degrees at the University of Texas at Austin. Anderson founded RAD in 2010, Hill joined soon after, and they relocated to L.A. in 2015.
RAD’s first item was a perforated-top dining table, the refined version of which skilled artisans in the factory—located near the L.A. River in Frogtown—continue to craft using sheets of custom-specified metal supplied by a partner manufacturer. Anderson’s architectural thinking informs the concept, which resonates with like-minded professionals in part “because it doesn’t take up a lot of visual space.” Optimized airflow keeps the surface cool in outdoor settings—a key advantage, given that many RAD clients have sun-pummeled outdoor work areas or sidewalk cafés to furnish. “To make this table looks super simple, but there’s a lot of nuance that goes into it,” he adds.
With many of RAD’s pieces, the devil is in the complex details. “We lean into the make-ability of a piece and using the material the way it wants to be used,” Anderson says, putting all his weight on the back of a bright orange Bent Stool to demonstrate the flexibility and stability of its solid rod steel leg construction. Across the RAD portfolio, strategic manipulation of already-recycled industrial materials maximizes efficiency and yields minimal waste.
Anderson and Hill are eager to explore new possibilities encompassing design, manufacturing, and customer experience. They’ve recently added aluminum goods production to their in-house capabilities, expanded into e-commerce, and experimented with upholstered furniture and one-off specialized designer collaborations. And to further test the waters outside the territory of the commercial-grade market, this past December they debuted the RAD showroom and store a few miles away in Atwater Village.
What Anderson describes as “a community vibe,” inspired by skate shop culture, influences the casual setup, which has another benefit. In addition to receiving feedback in real time, they can further introduce Lander, a skateboard company that was born out of Anderson’s spontaneous repurposing of a metal offcut. The perforated decks are produced by metamorphosing fishing nets with injection molds, yet another exercise of resourceful material usage. Lander and RAD show how businesses can have fun and stay values-centered while being taken seriously by end users.
“Nothing makes us happier than to be specified by the facilities person” who interacts with RAD Furniture on the most practical, fundamental level, Anderson notes. “We take a lot of pride in that.”
Emblem
Jeffrey and Lindsay Braun have a nagging obsession with a particular furniture category. “If you think about banquettes, they have to be custom almost every time—unless you have a square room,” Lindsay says with a laugh. Since she launched Emblem in 2019 with her business partner and husband, Jeffrey, this item has become a niche expertise. The Southern California design workshop’s “special sauce” for its banquette seating involves a proprietary method of designing a visually appealing crown and a comfortable fit with “loft in the sit. It’s not just flat. And only took about twenty years” to get right, she jokes.
The made-to-order furniture enterprise’s history predates its founding. The couple met when Jeffrey transitioned from a career in film production design in his native Chicago to creating an eponymously named residential furniture brand in Seattle, and Lindsay was a marketing and communications professional. With Lindsay onboard, they expanded to hospitality and commercial projects in 2008. “We envisioned a company that could respond to requests for furniture that belonged in your home but was built for commercial environments,” Lindsay recalls. Then after encountering quality control issues and accountability hiccups, they realized, “We have to own our manufacturing. We need to be able to walk into the next room and see it being built,” Lindsay explains.
Among the many reasons the Brauns moved their family and ever-evolving business to Southern California in 2017 was the integrated ease of sustainable practices. Other states might present overall lower costs, but “if you manufacture in California, you’re always going to be on the leading edge of sustainability and air quality standards for the entire country,” along with labor protections, Lindsay says. Materials are meticulously sourced, from domestic lumber to foam produced locally to the metal sourced from a nearby family-owned metal shop. Emblem’s location in Chino puts it at the center of trade know-how that in some cases extends multiple generations, too. That said, “it is an aging workforce. We’re trying to bring in younger workers and apprentice them,” Jeffrey shares.
Offerings start with Emblem’s catalog of standard products accompanied by pre-vetted contract-grade upholstery options. Maintaining a line available for orders of all scales “opens doors for large custom, one-of-a-kind projects,” Jeffrey explains. He describes his process as “responsive-driven design,” which addresses unique circumstances but also can be generalized. Even if “resimercial” is a derided term in some circles, for instance, it accurately captures the growing demand for Emblem’s soft, inviting, sinuous seating that can accommodate large spaces and numbers of users in welcoming workplace settings.
With this model, neither material goods nor relationships are disposable. “It’s funny how trust can be a sustainability measure,” Lindsay muses. “Our clients know they can call us. We don’t leave them to fend for themselves. It’s a much more human-centered approach.”
Cerno
Merging design experiments with a love of the natural world was a core component of Cerno’s founders’ friendship before it became an entrepreneurial tenet. Bret Englander, Nick Sheridan, and Daniel Wacholder grew up together in Laguna Beach, California, where their “friendship always revolved around this love of being outside and exploration,” Englander recalls. “As we got older and more skilled, that became about building things.” Fast-forward to 2009, when after dabbling in furniture, the trio determined that integrating their respective skills—Englander in business development and marketing, Sheridan in architecture, and Wacholder in engineering—would be well matched with a certain fast developing design trade and consumer goods category. “We loved that lighting sits at this intersection of design, utility, sculpture, beauty, and all the other benefits of its ability to transform a space,” he adds.
What takes place within Cerno’s 20,000-square-foot, solar-powered Orange County headquarters demonstrates how vertical integration and innovation are seamlessly compatible. Even technologically savvy LED lighting fabrication marries multiple time-honored trades, some of which wouldn’t be out of place in a medieval guild. Zones on the Cerno factory floor are dedicated to wood, metal, and other specialties, and work cells are organized “so that things are built in a one-piece flow fashion. The same person will take a product as far as they can, from raw materials to actually packaging it themselves,” Wacholder explains. The sense of ownership and pride from start to finish also supports Cerno’s internal apprenticeship model, intended to nurture talent while valuing all physical and nonmaterial resources the endeavor calls for. “There’s a mission in trying to keep the flame lit,” Wacholder says.
In 2022, Cerno expanded its toolbox and creative potential with the acquisition of Siemon & Salazar, whose specialty, glass blowing, Wacholder describes as “the most artisan craft.” Master glassblowers Caleb Siemon and Carmen Salazar retain the autonomy to create their own goods in a section of the workshop centered around a furnace and other traditional equipment used in Murano, Italy, while collaborating on Cerno products, such as the Inviso sconce, which features glass components.
The aesthetic of the Southern California design workshop leans toward contemporary with subtle nods to the past. Hand-finished surfaces bring warmth to delicate profiles and sleek silhouettes, making them well suited to hospitality and multifamily projects, along with individual consumer purchases. Sheridan synthesizes multiple references “in a lot of different directions,” citing Scandinavian minimalism and Japanese joinery as examples of generally complementary elements. “We continually improve our process and our product on all levels, but we really want to listen to the marketplace and make decisions based on data and conversations we have with designers,” he says.
As part of its sustainability efforts, Cerno actively recycles metals and plastics, offers unused lumber to craftspeople and artists in the area, participates in tree planting programs, and like RAD and Emblem, emphatically stands behind the longevity of products. “Building things that last is important to us,” Wacholder states, which means thinking holistically about avoiding consumer culture’s dispose-first impulse. The Cerno team strives for “things that can be fixed—and supporting people that want to fix them.”
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