# 283: From Craft to Manufacturing: How Crafted Glory’s Kwadwo Som-Pimpong Is Scaling a Furniture Business While Working the Night Shift

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/manufacturing-happy-hour-854319/283-from-craft-to-manufacturing-how-crafted-glory-s-kwadwo-som-pimpong-is-scaling-a-furniture-business-while-working-the-night-shift
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/manufacturing-happy-hour-854319/283-from-craft-to-manufacturing-how-crafted-glory-s-kwadwo-som-pimpong-is-scaling-a-furniture-business-while-working-the-night-shift.md
Podcast: [Manufacturing Happy Hour](https://stenobird.com/podcast/manufacturing-happy-hour-854319)
Published: 2026-04-14T09:00:00+00:00
Episode link: http://manufacturinghappyhour.com
Audio file: https://episodes.captivate.fm/episode/8307aaa5-decb-4e72-8e0f-627df1b98f23.mp3
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JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/manufacturing-happy-hour-854319/episodes/283-from-craft-to-manufacturing-how-crafted-glory-s-kwadwo-som-pimpong-is-scaling-a-furniture-business-while-working-the-night-shift
Duration seconds: 2826

## Resource

Kwadwo Som-Pimpong started making furniture in 2015 because he bought a house with no furniture and decided to build his own. A decade later, he runs Crafted Glory, a small-batch luxury furniture brand blending West African artistry with Scandinavian design, while working 10-hour shifts at Eaton as a fabrication supervisor. In this episode, Chris sits down with Kwadwo to trace the journey from those first end tables built in a garage to a full-scale business. The conversation covers how Kwadwo manages the constraints of four to five hours in the shop each day, including three strategies he has put in place, a clipboard for tracking time and tasks, using Claude to reflect and connect the dots on the 40-minute drive home, and a networking story from New York that turned one photo on Instagram into a series of interior design projects. He also walks through the Echoes of the Forest project, two pieces made from trees uprooted by Hurricane Helene, one already installed in Biltmore Forest Town Hall and one headed for Asheville’s historic YMI Cultural Center. In this episode, find out: How Kwadwo got into furniture making in 2015 out of necessity, moving into a house with no furniture and discovering he’d rather build his own, and how that organic beginning grew into Crafted Glory How his dual engineering degree from Carnegie Mellon gives him the mindset and the resilience to keep working through problems that feel unsolvable What he observed visiting Hellman Chang’s manufacturing plant in Georgia, component part numbers, scan systems, work cells, and 5S, and how it changed what scaling from craft to production can look like while keeping the handmade element intact How 12 years as a fabrication supervisor at Eaton translated directly into running his own team, applying meth…

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