Built by a designer, in a wood-only factory in Shaji.

Before I built furniture, I was a children's photographer.

I learned how to compose, how to read light — how to shape a portrait with a single lamp. As an intern and then as a full-time photographer after graduation, I photographed over 3,000 children at a studio that never seemed to slow down. Most of their faces have faded. One has not. A six-year-old girl, wearing a wig — her hair lost to chemotherapy.

Years later, I learned that formaldehyde exposure has long been linked to childhood respiratory and immune conditions, and that hers may not have been an isolated case. I decided I would spend my career building the kind of furniture I would put in my own children's room.

That has not been a perfect path. Shipments have arrived damaged. Specifications have come back wrong from the workshop floor. I am still improving packaging, still tightening tolerances. There is a long road ahead.

But one thing I can tell you with confidence: I have never shipped a bookshelf that exceeded formaldehyde limits. Not once. Not in eleven years.

Soochow University, BA in Visual Communication Design (2014). Worked as a children's photographer for two years before founding the workshop in 2015. A father.

That last fact matters more than the others. One of my children attends a Montessori program in China — close enough that I see what works in a classroom and what doesn't, every week. It's an angle most children's furniture factories don't have. I won't pretend it makes me a Montessori expert. It does mean I notice details.