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Phillips Collection is an industry leader in sustainable furnishings and circularity. Their motto is “every piece a conversation” and the furniture celebrates nature, never taking away from it.

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Designer Laurence Carr meets manufacturers and brands who are employing circular, regenerative, and sustainable practices. See how they're seeking to change the end-of-life concept with eco-friendly techniques.

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Transcript
00:00🎵
00:30Philips Collection is widely recognized as an industry leader in sustainable furnishings and circular practices.
00:37Their legacy is one of innovation and preservation, dedicated to environmental transparency and stewardship,
00:45ever evolving and improving in their artistry, vision, approach and practices.
00:51Their furniture pieces celebrate and honor nature, never taking away from it,
00:56and help support the communities from which their creations are born.
01:00Let's meet Mark Phillips and Jason Phillips.
01:04Welcome to our new series. Great to have you both.
01:08Please briefly introduce yourself and your products.
01:11Sure. I'm Mark Phillips, CEO of Philips Collection,
01:15where we have an organic contemporary line of furniture and decorative accessories.
01:20We're a family-run business, 35 years now,
01:24bringing what I'd like to think is unusual and extraordinary furniture to market.
01:29So what inspired you to get into the furnishings industry initially?
01:34My wife and I went to Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Philippines, India, Ceylon, all over the world,
01:43and were smitten by the travel and the art and the artistry.
01:47And we poured ourselves into the study of this very small field of collectors and museums
01:53interested in antique Buddhist and Hindu sculpture.
01:56When we started having kids, we realized that we needed to have a more regular paycheck
02:03than glorious paychecks from museums, and we began to discover items,
02:08and we became a company of discovery.
02:11When Jason and Jessica joined us, their skills as designers,
02:16and Jason has a degree in design and industrial design,
02:19changed our business from one of discovery to one of design.
02:23I, of course, as the new generation, came into a company that was already 20 years in business,
02:30and it enthralled me from the start.
02:32And that's really because of the travel,
02:34seeing that mom and dad were doing something completely different than the rest of the industry.
02:39We go to the beat of a different drum.
02:41Dad is often described as Indiana Jones, so I guess that makes me Indiana Junior.
02:46Watching their passion for product, I think that's where everything starts.
02:51Mom and dad happen to have a sense of what's new and what's next and what's sophisticated,
02:56and it's just been exciting to be part of that.
02:59Our company has grown a lot over the years,
03:02so purchasing decisions can't be made where we're just testing categories gently.
03:07Everything has to be a little more thought out.
03:09And I think what's really pertinent to our conversation today, transparency and stewardship.
03:14How does a company protect the environment and not produce disposable goods?
03:19Because that's one of the most exciting things we do here.
03:22We bring products to market that have very minimal impact on the environment.
03:26Absolutely. Yes, we'll talk about this. That's very exciting.
03:30So tell me more about Philips Collections' commitment to sustainability.
03:34The whole evolution of product from Philips Collection has been on an intimate artisanal relationship.
03:43We have worked closely with small villages and small towns that have a great respect for their environment,
03:52and it can't help but rub off on you.
03:54And their dedication to saving and not wasting influenced our emphasis in design to reapply the waste pieces.
04:03And that is now a big part of our business to see how little actually gets thrown out.
04:08This is a challenge and something we celebrate.
04:11There's also the business side of being green and the opportunities we have there.
04:17One of the first things we did when we bought our new building was replace all of the fluorescent bulbs,
04:23and we disposed of them responsibly with a machine that actually caught the off gases.
04:30And we had close to 5,000 bulbs that our staff lined up and put into this machine that ate it and caught the escaping gases.
04:39And we really got everybody thinking about saving and not wasting and capturing.
04:45What sustainable and particularly circular practices are you most proud to have adopted at Philips Collections?
04:53We produce wooden furniture, and there are 100 ways, if not 1,000, to bring that to market and to try to be sustainable.
05:01So what we do, we use every part of the tree.
05:04No trees are cut down for our production.
05:06So when we acquire wood, it's through either storm fallen, potentially a drought, a flood, trees that were long ago felled.
05:15No trees are cut down to make our products, so we're collecting what we find, and we use every part of the tree.
05:21So we sell live edge slabs, which come from the trunks, but there are things to be done with what's called the crown of a tree, where it becomes the heavy branches.
05:28And we also are digging up root systems, oftentimes 20, 30 feet long, where you can create more pieces.
05:36So we create tables, then we create smaller tables, then we create sculpture, then we create tabletop objects.
05:43And even with the last little scraps of branches, we create wall art.
05:47And we've had these really happy moments as we've grown.
05:50When you make five tables, you get 20 pieces of scrap, and it's hard to wrap your head around it as a designer, what can I do with this?
05:57But when you make 30 tables, and you have 500 scraps, now you're actually seeing a design in the pile to use for something else.
06:04So that came up with our Olympic collection, which Dad will talk about.
06:07We started with a visit to Haiti, in cooperation with Aid to Artisans, in an attempt to use our eye and resources to create viable businesses out of the rather scarce resources and business sensibilities in Haiti.
06:23And among the things we found were discarded oil drums.
06:27And we worked in partnership with them to hammer them and craft them.
06:33We taught them a little bit about the business.
06:35Let's not just take the lids, but let's find, with this same diameter, how many we can cut out of the whole barrel.
06:42And we were able to get 11 cuts out of a barrel, and we were able to bring a product to market that we sold through Bloomingdale's to the delight of the Haitians and to the customers.
06:53It was just a terrific experience.
06:57We took that history, and on a trip to Thailand with Jason, we saw a bunch of decommissioned honey drums, which are also oil drums.
07:07We spoke with our partners there, and they created a wall mounting called our galvanized wall decor, where we actually celebrated the oxidized portions of the oil drums or honey drums.
07:22But we were left with one challenging piece.
07:24Every time we cut a circle, there was one little circle that wasn't included, and we couldn't figure out what to do with that.
07:31Our partner came up with the Olympic ring wall decor, where we took five of these circles, welded them together, and actually brought to market a product that was the waste of the waste.
07:43That sounds fantastic, and it's definitely a great illustration of no waste and recycling, upcycling, reusing, and transforming an old product into a new product.
07:55Is there another product that most represents you, sustainability-wise?
08:01We have many products here that we are proud of how we go full circle with sustainability.
08:06I'm going to talk more about a category briefly, which encompasses three products.
08:10It's room dividers.
08:12We do these lovely vertical pieces, often eight or ten feet tall, in the form of our chainsaw collection, our maki collection, and I think what's most exciting, our atlas collection.
08:23The common thread in all of these is using the pieces that couldn't be turned into our bread and butter dining tables and coffee tables and consoles.
08:31In the case of the chainsaw sculpture, we're taking the last slice from the tree trunk.
08:36These large tree trunks' last slice can't be turned into a table, so we score it, we light it on fire to get a char effect, mount it on a base.
08:44The maki screen takes roots that are not 17 inches tall to make a coffee table, or maybe can't stand on their own, and we put them in a metal frame.
08:53Atlas, I think, is our most breakthrough, because these are discarded chunks of wood.
08:58Picture any chunk of neglected—that's a word Dad loves to use, and I think it's great—pieces of wood, now have these playful figures cast in metal, holding up the edges that can't stand on their own.
09:10These are products that are inherently pieces of discarded wood.
09:15What else could you possibly do with it?
09:17It's instantaneously sustainable.
09:20Yes, it is, and it looks stunning, absolutely stunning.
09:25It speaks for itself, very organic, with different branches going here and there, absolutely stunning.
09:32What materials do you most commonly use, and where are raw materials for your furnishings sourced?
09:39About 75% of our product is made from wood, wood that is sourced within a few hundred kilometers—we use those terms because we're dealing internationally—from the suppliers.
09:51Yes, kilometers is fine.
09:53Kilometers is fine.
09:54Yes, we have to measure things, and we have to always be very careful developing products, not to get inches confused with centimeters.
10:00We've introduced some very small tables in the past, accidentally.
10:04But no, everything is sourced within a radius.
10:07We know that we, as a company, to be fully transparent and honest, we're bringing product in from 12,000 miles away.
10:14That is a gap we'd love to bridge one day, maybe make more product in the U.S., but for the time being, our sustainability efforts have to happen overseas.
10:23So product is sourced from a small radius.
10:26We try to do all the tooling under one supplier.
10:30As much as it would make sense to maybe get your metal from India or China, and then the wood from Indonesia or Thailand, we find that there are many benefits to sourcing locally.
10:39So a lot of our investment happens within the small communities we work.
10:43On the other end, something I don't think we'll touch on too much in this conversation is what we're doing with cast materials.
10:50So we also have great capabilities working with stone composites, where you're creating molds of some of our roots, and there's a lot of sustainability in that as well.
10:59We're using pulverized stone instead of plastics and resins to create our molded goods.
11:04It has a very concrete feel.
11:06It works outdoors.
11:08So we're having great success with finishes we call Roman stone and white stone, and now we're introducing a charcoal stone.
11:14Really wonderful things.
11:15As you follow Phillips Collection throughout this year, you're going to see a lot of that brought to market.
11:20Can you share with us some detail about what sustainable options you use for your joinery, paint, and finishes?
11:28Yes, great question.
11:29Everything is low VOC.
11:31That's a starting point.
11:32That's an easy area for companies to tackle.
11:35So even the sheen of our products, even though we're using a low VOC polyurethane, we are doing little to no sheen, so it's really about the natural look of the product.
11:46These pieces have to hold up.
11:48Sustainability also comes to you don't want to create a disposable piece of furniture.
11:52It has to be able to stand up to the aesthetics moving forward.
11:57You have to think about what's a piece of furniture somebody might want to own for 50 years, but also you want to make sure that it's durable.
12:04If we create great dining tables that crack and split and can be scratched easily, as sustainable as we're trying to be, someone's going to throw it out.
12:12Thank you for mentioning the longevity of a product.
12:17That is just absolutely part of sustainability.
12:20You just want to make sure you create products that you can pass down from one generation to another.
12:28Thinking about longevity is part of extending the life of a product.
12:34That's what we'd like to think about when creating products.
12:38My next question is, how does Philips measure its impact?
12:42Through the Sustainable Furnishings Council and the efforts of Jerry Cooklin and Susan Inglis, who we all love, we have vendor scorecards.
12:52The first time we were founding members of the Sustainable Furnishings Council, it's got to be 12 to 15 years ago at this point.
12:59We had to fill out forms that I didn't even know the answers to 90% of these questions.
13:05I didn't even know what they were asking.
13:07I didn't know that it was important to measure how far of a radius we're sourcing our product from.
13:12It started as an exercise in wanting to reach exemplary status within the organization and realizing there's a lot of areas for improvements.
13:20To answer your question, on an annual basis, we are measuring ourselves versus the year before.
13:27While I don't have specific numbers to give you in any one category, we are recycling 90% of our cardboard.
13:33We separate from our trash, let's say from lunches here, trash from recycling.
13:40It is through the Sustainable Furnishings Council scorecard, which I believe they can make available to even just interested consumers listening, really how rigorous it gets.
13:50We are leaders, but we are not perfect.
13:53It's very important for companies to be honest about that.
13:56It has to start in senior management.
13:59If I wasn't a Phillips, and I worked at Phillips Collection, and Mark wasn't a believer in sustainability and didn't drive a Tesla,
14:06it'd be very hard for me as a 30-something-year-old to convince my boss to change the way we look at our company.
14:13So I urge owners of businesses to look in the mirror, peel back the lens, because you probably are doing more than you realize,
14:20and you should celebrate that and market that and improve where you can.
14:24It's no longer more expensive to be green.
14:26There used to be a myth that it was 15% more expensive to bring a green product in.
14:31That's no longer true.
14:33It's marginally more expensive, and the marketing value you get of that, I think, exceeds the extra cost.
14:40And it's a pleasure to turn your company into a company that has a lower carbon footprint.
14:46Absolutely. Contributing to the greater good and the betterment of the planet is definitely very fulfilling and rewarding.
14:54Tell us about Phillips' approach to product longevity in a market that too often leans toward low-cost and short-term use.
15:03So we look at longevity a few different ways.
15:06Product quality and construction has to last for, we would like to think, 50 or 100 years, if not longer.
15:14And that's through building it correctly.
15:17We're using solid woods everywhere, never veneers, so nothing's going to peel off.
15:22We're kiln-drying it in ways that it's not going to split or develop a mildew.
15:27But longevity also, I think, is about the style.
15:31It could be beautiful today, and if it doesn't fit tomorrow, it's not going to work.
15:36People think about that when designing a home.
15:38You may like something ultra-modern or mid-century, and maybe that's not in style in years.
15:44So we celebrate nature.
15:46I think that's a pretty foolproof way of having longevity in the industry.
15:51It's a product that is intended to deliberately be as simple and organic as possible.
15:57It's really easy for a company to say, OK, this is the color of the year, so we're going to make everything that color this year.
16:03Well, that sort of lends itself to, you should buy a new one from us next year with the new color of the year.
16:08So we keep a very neutral, natural palette.
16:12And we really regard others in our industry who do the same thing very highly.
16:17I think it's easy to do something in a shocking neon green if that's popular, but that's not going to be popular in five years.
16:24So product construction and timelessness of design, I think, are the most important ways to have longevity.
16:31I guess a third way is provenance.
16:33I think it's everyone's goal to become a company where you have collectible items.
16:37I have a century cabinet or a Baker sofa or a Christopher Guy chandelier.
16:42Pride in what you own is going to make it a collectible.
16:46That's right, because we actually understand more and more that the more consciously and mindfully we choose the products
16:54and how to design the surroundings we live in or we work in, benefits to our physical, emotional, and mental well-being.
17:03So actually, they are interrelated.
17:06And the more we pay attention to what we want to surround us with, the more we want to collect
17:11and make sure that we choose products for longevity and for our well-being.
17:15So yes, absolutely.
17:17And I would not hesitate to choose, you know, Philips Collection products.
17:22What is the circular challenge you are facing with your business?
17:26The biggest challenge we've had immediately is how to translate our stunning 3D products into 2D media.
17:35We don't have a fungible good.
17:37We have one of a kind.
17:39We may have a thousand live edge tables, but TH5203 is not the same as 5204.
17:45So how do we communicate this difference and how do we continue to market our products in a changing world with changing tastes and instant communication?
17:56We're proud of our process.
17:58We're proud of our staff.
17:59We're proud of our facility.
18:01We're proud of our products.
18:02So I think it translates into any communication that people have with Philips.
18:08And whatever sustainable practices are you hoping to include in the future?
18:12It's easy for a furniture company that manufactures to say, how do I improve manufacturing?
18:17Then it's how do I improve freight?
18:20And some of these considerations are buying the right quantity of product.
18:23It's inefficient to buy 100 tables when you only need 25.
18:27So purchasing decisions at that level, but then it comes full circle to domestic and things like adopting a street,
18:34having the staff involved in things like how we dispose of light bulbs or the decision Mark's making when we acquire a new building,
18:41what kinds of paints go on the wall?
18:43What kind of construction needs do we have?
18:46We are embracers of technology and that goes from a new technology we're using to dry our woods.
18:53It's called a vacuum kiln that allows us to reach temperatures where other woods would catch fire because there is no oxygen in it.
19:02And it speeds the process and enhances the woods.
19:06We are now investigating 3D scanning of our products so that we can communicate with our factories without sending them a sample,
19:16which is frightfully expensive and a terrible footprint.
19:20Yes, it seems so. I mean, using technology the right way can definitely help and serve your best business to its best purpose.
19:28And it certainly seems you're doing that with your children.
19:33What trends do you foresee in the industry as we move into the future?
19:38I think the industry is trending in a way towards what we love, which is not a benefit to us to have more competition in our world,
19:46but that is a return to nature, authentic product that you can be transparently proud about.
19:54So natural materials and natural finishes.
19:58We developed a wonderful gray finish, which is an enhancement of wood.
20:03But in the other direction, the bleach look. So I think we sun bleach. That's increasingly popular.
20:08So I think people want tactile finishes and they want the story. And these are things we've been doing all along.
20:14So we're feeling some competition creeping into our world.
20:18But if Phillips Collection was a company that needed to worry about people copying us two years later,
20:23we wouldn't be in business. We're a company that's always evolving to the next.
20:27So there are people doing things righter than we. Who excites us are makers and freelancers in Brooklyn
20:36who are getting these wonderful projects where they celebrate every last detail of how they source this exact piece of wood
20:42and turn it into that and can customize that. There are really wonderful things happening out there.
20:47I love what you say, Jason. The fact that you demonstrate curiosity and you are really not afraid of all the inspiration
20:56of the contemporary makers that are right there around you, even though you're leading this business,
21:03just says everything about your mindset. Competition is good because it shows that you're a leader.
21:09Phillips Collection is a leader company and inspires many different makers and artisans.
21:16What do you want the Phillips legacy to be?
21:19I'd like to be remembered that everything we've touched, we made a little more beautiful without borrowing on the future.
21:28Legacy that I'd love to leave behind is a company that continues to push boundaries on design and creativity and sustainability.
21:36And have it be something that my son, should he choose to want to join the company, would be proud to be a part of and keep going.
21:42Thank you, Mark. Thank you, Jason. It's been a pleasure interviewing you both and having you speak about your beautiful and truthful company, Phillips Collection.
21:55Mark, Jason and the entire Phillips Collection team are clearly pioneers in the realm of sustainability and circularity in the furniture industry.
22:06Their commitment to art and design is enhanced by their environmentalist approach, allowing them to envision innovative, beautiful and functional uses
22:15for what would otherwise become waste, support the local communities from which their pieces originate,
22:21and model for other businesses the limitless possibilities for more circular design.
22:27From where they source their materials to how they reduce their waste,
22:31Phillips Collection not only has their finger on the pulse of sustainable furnishings,
22:36but helps further and amplify the movement toward normalizing circular design.
22:57you

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