Life.Culture.Discovery.

I started a sustainable furniture brand in Hong Kong. Here’s what I’ve learned

In 2014, interior architect Caroline Olah founded her furniture brand with a commitment to responsible design. She recounts what happened when she saw the wood – not just the trees

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Caroline Olah, founder of Reddie, says her company’s goal is 100 per cent waste-based products. Photo: courtesy Reddie

Published: 6:00pm, 26 Apr 2025

Sustainability. I confess, as a furniture brand owner committed to its principles, I dislike the term. It’s a tangled, buzzword-laden concept that is, frankly, confusing. Absolute sustainability is impossible for any business because even eco-friendly products require transport.

At the end of 2014, when I founded Reddie (a play on “ready-made” and Eddie, my son’s name) in Hong Kong, I aimed to build a mid-to-large-scale furniture brand with showrooms in Sydney, London and New York, employing 20 people in each location. I wanted to do right by our planet, but was unsure how to proceed. So I simplified our mission: prioritise using waste to make products. Instead of following a manual, I trusted my instincts throughout the production process, an approach that has guided us, ironically, to environmental responsibility.

Our transparent practices ensure our furniture’s compliance for use in buildings with high-rated standards such as WELL and Green Star. And we are 80 per cent of the way towards obtaining FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) certification for reclaimed-wood production, with full recognition expected this year.

Olah’s Sydney home, where she now lives after leaving Hong Kong for Australia, features her reclaimed-teak designs. Photo: Desmond Chan

My entrepreneurial roots can be traced to my days as an interior architect in New York, when I felt frustrated specifying furniture for projects. Designer commercial furniture was impressive but lacked soul – mass-produced, it offered little versatility or opportunity for personalisation. The organic quality of handcrafted pieces was lost in the machinery of mass production.

Sustainability posed another challenge. Many brands flaunted numbers but danced around the elephant in the room: what the products were made of. It struck me as absurd that waste was not prioritised as a primary resource. Why not repurpose discarded materials destined for landfills? This approach mitigates emissions while avoiding the energy-intensive process of manufacturing new materials. I didn’t need a degree in sustainability to grasp this logic.

Looking back, my naivety was a blessing. I undertook the formidable task of creating a commercially viable line of design-led, handmade-to-order customisable furniture primarily from reclaimed and recycled materials.

It struck me as absurd that waste was not prioritised as a primary resource

Caroline Olah

I was also trying to have a family. In 2013, I moved from New York to Kuala Lumpur, with my husband, Andrew, for his job at Google. With a baby on the way, and some down time, it was the perfect time to explore my ideas. I wrote a business plan, designed a collection and began to look for a manufacturer.