Our Approach to Business.
We are an independent, family-owned business located in Davenport, Iowa. Our product is designed and built by us with the vast majority of raw materials, components, and services, supplied by others from the Great Plains, the Midwest, and the South.
Being a “business-to-business” business we realize our choices are important. We guide what our suppliers produce and how they make it. We influence what products customers are able to choose from. The impact of that consumption is a collective responsibility.
Our company continuously seeks the best materials, processes, and partners, to help us produce contract quality outdoor furniture.
The materials we work with.
We’ve chosen a variety of Southern Yellow Pine (SYP) called Loblolly. It is the fastest-growing, commercially harvested tree in North America. Within 30 years, a tree can grow to 100 feet tall and produce two or three times the amount of lumber as a hardwood species such as ash, oak, or maple.
Native to the south eastern United States, SYP has been sustainably managed for over 50 years and the region has emerged as one of the most productive wood producers in the world.
SYP is strong, stiff, and dense. Traditionally is has been used structurally for trusses, joists and rafters. It is also a favorite for flooring–it is the hardest of softwoods, in fact SYP is similar in hardness to cherry and ash.
Follow this link from the USDA to learn more about SYP and its management in the United States.
Steel is a pragmatic choice. It is strong, durable, and heavy. These are features that are beneficial when considering the performance of outdoor furniture. A Parcel arm chair weighs 17 pounds and an 8’ picnic table is over 350. Our table legs are 11 gauge structural steel tubes and 1/4” steel plate–we make tough stuff.
Most of the hardware we use is 316 or 18-8 Stainless Steel. These are the alloys used for food preparation and outdoor applications.
The glides on our tables and benches are made from UHMW Polyethylene. This category of plastic is the same used for plastic cutting boards—it is very durable and the best choice for gliding over rough, outdoor surfaces.
The processes we use.
Like any manufacturer, we take raw materials and work with them to make a product. We process the steel and wood in unique ways to improve its functionality and maintain its aesthetics.
The environments which Parcel’s furniture are used in can be very harsh—Minnesota’s winters, Colorado’s mountains, or Texas’s sun. Unfinished steel will quickly corrode; wood will fade and deteriorate.
For our first step, we use a coating technique perfected in the auto industry to prevent corrosion, called Electrophoretic Painting. After our components are coated inside and out with this high performance primer, they are coated again with a polyester paint that is specifically formulated for outdoor architectural applications and compliant with AAMA 2604.
After trees are harvested, they are sawn into boards and dried in a kiln. This lowers the moisture content, stabilizes the board and increases its strength.
But because our products are used outdoors, we add two more steps... The boards are processed with a water based antibacterial solution and then kiln dried a second time. This deters rot and further limits warping or twisting.
After that we select what boards we wish to use. We utilize only lumber with “straight grain” cuts for our furniture. These are also known as quartersawn or riftsawn boards. Visually, the graining is linear across the entire width and length of the boards and knots are rarely seen.
Our Partners.
Truth-be-told, at Parcel we are mostly woodworkers. Beyond the effort Parcel puts into their furniture, our partner for metal fabrication contributes more significantly than anyone else to the total value of our products.
We purchase the majority of our steel from distributors of American produced material. To fabricate that steel into our product, we work closely with another Iowan company.
This partner is a certified Woman-Owned Business. What intrigues us most, is that her factory creates as much energy as it consumes–it’s 100% solar powered.
Their story is best told by her at this link. There you will learn that a ground mount solar array made them the first fully solar powered manufacturing and fabrication facility of this size in Iowa.