Toja Grid is a very interesting business that is changing the furniture game.

My patio furniture is around eight years old and is looking pretty rough.

We spent the time stripping it and staining it a few years ago. We put it under a giant cover during winter. But this Canadian climate is punishing and it may be time to retire our sectional and find a new one. This pains me. I like to think everything should be built to last forever, but I know planned obsolescence is a thing.

So I started searching for patio furniture and I got sticker shock. And on Costco! I mean $3-4000 for a sectional patio sofa? That’s crazy.

But I realize it’ a giant package to ship so that must be part of the reason. So I check Ikea, masters of the efficient flat pack furniture, and they do have sectionals in the $1,000 range, but that’s what we did last time and I just can’t see myself stripping every nook and cranny in a few years as it took forever last time.

So I kept looking and found an innovative Canadian business doing furniture in a new way.

In Blue Ocean Strategy, a fantastic book by the way, the authors detail ways to find and create a business that is in a blue ocean, a landscape that lacks competition. A simple example is Yellowtail wine. When it came out you had cheap stuff like Boones and fancy stuff that impressed people. Then Yellowtail created an approachable offering for a reasonable price and kicked off a new market.

In the furniture business you have do-it-yourself furniture on one end and shipped to you completely built on the other end. Ikea famously was shipping tables with the legs on and realized if they shipped them with the legs detached then it would save a ton in shipping costs. A new ocean was found and the flat pack furniture business was born. But on this spectrum Toja Grid has come up with a space in between DIY and Ikea. The no pack furniture business.

Toja Grid ships brackets that are used to build your furniture… but you have to buy the lumber yourself. They reason that shipping wood is very expensive, but everyone has access to it at their local hardware store so it’s a more efficient way to sell furniture. I think this is brilliant. It bridges the difficulty with DIY and lets you customize your furniture. If Ikea created flat pack furniture, Toja Grid created no pack furniture.

Their products look fantastic, you can customize the size and they were awarded patents for their innovations. This is a brilliant example of a company taking a pain point (high shipping costs) and creating an innovative solution. I’m still searching for that perfect sectional patio sofa, but at least the journey has led me to an interesting small business.

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