Paul D’Anna, President of Amish Resort Furniture, has successfully provided homeowners and designers with high quality, exceptional, solid-wood Amish furniture from his southeastern Michigan retail location since 1999. Two years ago, he expanded his business to offer custom orders on the Internet. D’Anna’s store and Web sites are now primary distribution systems for the Indiana and Ohio Amish woodworkers. The Amish do not deal directly with the public and rely exclusively on non-Amish retail stores and Web sites owners to market and sell their furniture.
A design engineer, D’Anna frequently attends Amish furniture expositions in Indiana and Ohio to meet prospective builders, determine which builders meet his high standards, and maintain his strong connection with the builders. He now has a successful relationship with over 150 individual woodworkers who have the ability to customize furniture to his specifications, meet his deadlines, and who faithfully stand behind their product. Most of the Amish builders can produce all of the various styles of furniture, including traditional, mission, shaker, country, modern, beach, and many more in any of the wood choices. However, since D’Anna specializes in highly-customized orders, his experience and knowledge of the various builders’ strengths are critical in determining which of the builders to select for the more unique designs.
D’Anna has earned a reputation for meeting the increasingly-unique furniture requirements of today’s individual consumers and can now offer this same service to designers and purchasers in the hospitality industry. In contrast to mass-produced furniture, each piece of Amish furniture is handcrafted in Ohio or Indiana using old world construction techniques. Consequently, D’Anna can work with any room layout and design requirement. The entire construction process, from growing the trees for lumber to constructing, finishing, and delivering the furniture is entirely done in the United States. Consequently, D’Anna can design and order furniture not available through traditional outlets.
In addition, each piece of Amish furniture is finished by hand, ensuring it is individually inspected. This results in an extremely high quality-control process.