“Design Without Rework.” — Arc & Spindle Studio
I’m Theo, founder of Arc & Spindle Studio. We design and build bespoke dining and
lounge chairs. Chairs are unforgiving: a 2° tweak in rake changes everything from leg length
to tenon shoulders. Before Woodshop Master, a “small change” could ripple into three
remakes because my patterns, finishes, and parts lists were living in different places.
Where we kept stumbling
I love iterating with clients—subtle backrest sweeps, arm profiles that echo their table, finish
tones that play with the room’s light. But version control was a mess. I’d be halfway through
a run and realize the seat rail spec I was using was V2 while the tenon jig was based on V1.
Material orders were padded because I didn’t trust my counts. Finishes? We had “recipes,”
but they lived in my head and three dog-eared notebooks.
The two-day turnaround that changed the studio
A hospitality client needed a first-article approval fast. I built the design in Woodshop Master
with variants for seat height, back rake, and arm width. Each variant carried its own BOM,
joinery notes, and jig settings. I attached our finish recipe (dye, seal, topcoat, cure times)
and shared a clean client view. They picked their preferred variant, left one comment, and
approved within 48 hours. We cut on Monday.
What Woodshop Master actually does for us
Variants, not guesswork. When I slide an arm 10mm, the BOM, hardware, and joinery notes follow. No hand-copying dimensions, no “wait, which jig?” moments.
Finish libraries. Our tones and steps are embedded in the job card. New apprentices follow the same process, and our color is finally consistent across batches.
Low-stock alerts that matter. Walnut and ash hit reorder points automatically. I don’t overbuy “just in case,” and I don’t hit pause mid-run.
Approvals that reduce rework. Clients sign off on the exact variant with linked drawings and photos. If we change something after, it’s logged—and billable.
Results that resonate
Material overage down ~28%
Rework down ~40% (most of it was version control—now gone)
First-article approvals in ~2 days (used to be 1–2 weeks with back-and-forth)
A cleaner pipeline: I know exactly how many chairs we can promise this month without gambling on stock
What it gave back to me
I started Arc & Spindle to obsess over curves, not spreadsheets. Now I spend my mornings
shaping arms and my afternoons meeting clients—confident that the build card the team is
following is the same one the client approved.
For studios like ours
Custom doesn’t have to mean chaotic. Woodshop Master lets me move quickly without paying the tax of mistakes.
We didn’t get “more creative” because of software—we got to keep the creativity we already had, minus the friction.