DutchCrafters celebrates 20 years of handcrafted perfection

By ALEXANDER POPP alex@appenmedia.com

ALPHARETTA, Ga. — When DutchCrafters CEO Jim Miller and his partner Miao Xue first went into business in 2003, they didn’t really know what they wanted to sell.

Normally, that doesn’t bode well for the survival of a business. But Miller and Xue, both former grad students at the University of South Florida, knew that an invention called the internet was starting to show a lot of potential for matching customers with niche products that were hard to find.

DutchCrafters will celebrate its 20th anniversary later this month, marking years of hard work through recessions, a global pandemic and countless other challenges that led them to become an industry leader in selling hand-crafted furniture to customers around the world.

“It’s been a great success story,” Miller said. “But wow, there were challenges along the way. It took a lot of work.”

Today DutchCrafters is known for selling high-end custom furniture made by Amish craftsmen from communities in Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania. But initially, Miller didn’t even think it would be possible to sell such an expensive product on the internet, which was seen as “shady” during its infancy.

“People didn’t trust it,” he said. “Consumers weren’t there yet. In 2003, total U.S. sales of eCommerce were something like 1.25 percent.”

Instead, they began selling nifty, but less expensive, Amish-made craft items like decorative wooden lighthouses and outdoor furniture, which weren’t really being sold anywhere else online.

All that changed when Miller and his wife, Linse, took a trip to Pennsylvania to scout for vendors, and she convinced him they’d be crazy not to try selling the beautifully crafted furniture they kept seeing.

“I said, that’s never going to work. There’s too many problems,” he said. “The next year we did about half a million dollars in revenues … So, it was a great time to be wrong.”

Like the trust they had to build with customers, Miller said they also had to slowly build relationships in the closeknit Amish craftsman community by convincing suppliers they could sell their products faster, more consistently and for higher prices than traditional brick-and-mortar stores.

“It was almost more difficult to break into the vendor community than it was with customers,” he said.

In October 2022 DutchCrafters cut the ribbon on their third location outside of their headquarters in Sarasota, Florida, and quality control warehouse in Indiana, a state-of-theart product showroom in downtown

Alpharetta.

Miller said DutchCrafters has been serving the North Fulton area for years, and he thinks that with the new location, they can boost their business in the region, while also charting a course for showrooms to open in other cities

“We’re really thrilled with the reception that we have had here from the business community and customers in Alpharetta,” he said. “We’ve felt really welcomed by it. We want to engage in the community and be part of it.”

But customers at the showroom aren’t going to take anything home with them, like they would from an Ikea, Rooms To Go, or other furniture stores. Instead, the showroom allows customers to learn about DutchCrafter’s products and options before their furniture is custom-made by Amish craftsmen.

A custom-made piece of furniture takes much longer to arrive at its final destination, months rather than weeks, but the end product is totally unique for each customer, Miller said.

“I call it slow furniture, like slow food,” he said. “Slow Food takes a little longer, yeah. But it usually tastes pretty good, you experience it in a different way. You sit down and enjoy it together with friends.”

Beyond that uniqueness, Miller said his customers are really buying a story.

“It’s an American story,” he said. “It’s a story that engages a high degree of authenticity. Real hands, real people working in small wood shops.”

For more information about DutchCrafter’s products and story, visit www.dutchcrafters.com.