Just about every furniture designer has entertained the thought of starting their own furniture company. Yet the skill set it takes to design furniture is much different than the skill set it takes to manufacture it, market it, sell it and run a company that brings everything together. Those barriers to entry have kept the ranks of designer-manufacturer very small.
Furniture designer Jim Contois is a little bit different. Like all good designers do, Contois noticed a niche in the market — a problem that needed to be solved. As he looked around the furniture industry, he wondered: “Where is all the moderately priced outdoor furniture?”

The high-end, high-quality outdoor furniture market is well represented and at the other end, there is no shortage of cheap, disposable outdoor furniture products. But for the average sized company that wants to add an outdoor workspace or lounge area, the options are extremely limited. So Contois took the leap and decided to start his own, Parcel Furniture, which sits squarely in the middle — affordable, but smartly styled; contract grade, but with a lightness and scale that can still work at home.
The Davenport, Iowa-based designer began working on Parcel in 2018. By October of 2019, he had the basics of the company put together. He had prototypes, a few vendors lined up to make parts he needed, he knew what he was going to make and had already signed up two rep groups.

His first order shipped the week the COVID pandemic shut down the economy. While the pandemic certainly put a wrench into growth plans, it wasn’t the end of the world. After all, Contois was selling outdoor furniture. As companies shut down, they began planning for what would come next and outdoor work seemed safer than packing people into offices at the time.
Still, business was slow. It was a quiet year. But Contois was able to use that time to connect the dots and add additional reps. “A lot of rep groups were itching to find something to add to their portfolio of products that represented the outdoor category,” he said. “So I actually was able to sneak into a fair number of rep groups pretty quickly, I think, compared to other companies that have started like this.”

So fast forward to 2023. The pandemic is mostly in the rearview mirror, yet the demand for outdoor furniture and activating outdoor areas continues to expand. Companies, schools — even hospitals and government agencies — are starting to use outdoor spaces as casual work areas, supported by wireless technology that makes it all possible.
“Around 2016, it became clear to me that the outdoor category was emerging or it was on the way up,” he said. “I knew that was probably the next corner of the industry to try and fill itself out. I had a couple ideas for what the product could be. None of the clients that I was doing design work for were really interested in pursuing that. They were all working in the corporate amenities space and all of them were pretty narrow within their focus. I don’t think any of them really wanted to take the risk of doing outdoor furniture, but I still thought it was a good idea and I still kept working on it in the back of my head. It just kind of kept snowballing. And I’m like, ‘Why not figure it out myself?’”

After beginning his career as an industrial designer at Armstrong World Industries, he moved on to KI, where he was an industrial designer for about five years. He followed that with a five-year stint as industrial design manager at Allsteel before going out on his own as an independent furniture designer. And for nearly 15 years, he worked with many mid-sized companies. He watched how they sourced products and components, how they personally added value to the products they designed and how they reached the market through independent sales rep groups.
Though Contois admits sales is not his strong suit he figured he could approach reps and tell them that they were already selling products he had designed for Arcadia, Indiana Furniture and Surface Works. They might not know him personally, but they were already selling products he designed. Why not add Parcel?

His time working in corporate design combined with his work as an independent designer created that elusive skill set that allowed him to start his own company. “Throughout your career, you end up getting different types of exposure. (In corporate design) You’re pretty siloed. It goes very, very deep. But it’s not broad.”
Contois started with a simple collection of products, designed and manufactured in Iowa. The company has picnic tables, pedestal tables and chairs, dining tables and chairs, counter and bar height tables, Adirondack chairs and occasional tables, and benches and milk stools. The products come in nine paint finishes and six wood finishes, giving designers plenty of options.

Parcel’s customers already include a who’s who of tech giants along with some pharmaceutical companies, schools and a few residential projects, common areas at apartments and bars and restaurants.
“It seemed like there was stuff at the top of the market and stuff on bottom. The stuff on top was beautiful, hard to get and expensive. The stuff on the bottom either looked like playground furniture or just wasn’t ergonomically correct for professional environments and had one year warranties or something absurd. It’s almost like throwaway furniture. So what I have found is that I am in the middle,” he said.
And that’s not a bad place to be.

