From Mexico To Mississippi: Why This Sofa Startup Is Now “Made In The USA”

Stephen Kuhl and Kabeer Chopra didn’t arrive at business school planning to start a sofa company. Kuhl was a former Accenture consultant; Chopra, a former analytics manager at Michael Kors. They first met years ago at a New Year’s Eve party, through a mutual friend, and later became project partners in a Wharton entrepreneurship class. (The same class Warby Parker’s founders attended, as it happens.)

“We were complaining about buying furniture over drinks one night,” Kuhl says–the standard gripes about Ikea assembly times and West Elm delivery fees. Fast-forward two years, and they are running a sofa startup called Burrow that solves the problems they faced at those established retailers. Burrow’s signature offering is a long-lasting, modular sofa that ships in boxes and can be assembled in minutes. Like Warby Parker and Casper, Burrow sells its products online and direct-to-consumer, which reduces costs.

Jennifer Schock, similarly, had no intention of one day running a furniture factory in New Houlka, Mississippi. A South Dakota native living in Minnesota, she built her career at Target, where she rose through the ranks to become a senior buyer. Later, she spent more than seven years running a furniture company based in China. But in January of this year, she and her husband found themselves standing on the factory floor at the upholstery company Chapter 3 as its proud new owners. Read more…