A lot of adjectives come to mind when first viewing a bark-covered Vermont Cedar Chair; comfortable is not one of them.

One might describe the chair as rustic, akin to Appalachian twig furniture. Its all-natural components – cedar and manila rope – give it a high Green quotient. It looks authentic and earthy and sturdy, perfect for a stage revival of “On Golden Pond.”

Still, one probably wouldn’t say it’s comfortable on first sight. That verdict comes only after sitting in a Vermont Cedar Chair. That’s when the curious architecture of the seat – 12 individual lengths of round cedar branches, roped together like a suspension bridge – reveals its secret.

Unlike the narrow wooden slats of an old-timey porch chair or the broader boards of an Adirondack chair, this seat offers some give. Shift your weight from one hip to the other, and it accommodates. Instead of eventually numbing the backside, this seat encourages the sitter to stay longer.

“They’re deceptive,” says Kevin Mavelli, a buyer for the retail division of Vermont Country Store (no relation to Vermont Cedar Chair Co.). “They don’t look like the most comfortable chair, but they are very relaxing. They’re very, very comfortable. We’ve done very well with those chairs.”

The Vermont Cedar Chair Co. made its first appearance at the Casual Market last September, where the backwoodsy furniture contrasted sharply with the highly refined finishes of resin, aluminum, steel and wicker in neighboring temporary spaces.

The unsophisticated look of the furniture made it stand out. Perhaps some buyers wrote it off for that reason. Others, however, gravitated to it. Among those who looked and liked were buyers from Cabela’s. The “World’s Foremost Outfitter” has more than 40 stores nationwide, in addition to on-line and catalog sales.

Founder and CEO Jason Lutz in the new Acadia Rocking Chair beside the flagship Vermont Rocker; behind him are bundles of cedar.

Cabela’s joins Plow & Hearth and the online giant Wayfair.com in offering the Vermont Cedar Chair’s hand-built products. That’s an impressive achievement for a tiny startup. The entire workforce of the Vermont Cedar Chair Co., including the office staff and production team, wouldn’t fill a 12-passenger van.

Last year, says Jason Lutz, the Vermont Cedar Chair Co.’s 30-year-old founder, was “a breakout year for us.” He understands the enormity of the challenges and opportunities facing his company thus far, but that doesn’t intimidate him in the least. A series of aggressive rollouts are planned for the months ahead.

“We feel like this year is going to be gangbusters,” he says.

Conceived in Jamaica

Lutz was studying mechanical engineering at Ohio State University when he went to Jamaica on summer break prior to his senior year. His purpose was to help a friend construct a house, but he wound up obsessed with how the local population was employing the island’s plentiful natural resources to make products for export.

“I had this idea for a bamboo, fair-trade furniture company,” Lutz recalls.

Inspired by the comfort of a suspended hammock chair, Lutz designed a traditional chair with an unconventional seat. Instead of being rigidly fixed, the chair’s seat floated in the frame, attached to the back and suspended from the sides by rope.

“Being very ambitious and naive, we made a prototype,” he says. “It was comfortable and unique looking.”

Lutz returned to Ohio State, tried unsuccessfully to create some buzz for his chair idea, and earned his degree in 2008. In addition to the chair design, his summertime experience in rural Jamaica had impressed upon him the tremendous obstacles to creating a manufacturing business there.

His suspension chair ideas were sidelined as he began to get inquiries from potential employers. Bright engineers are in demand, but the prospect of being deskbound for the next 40 years conflicted with his hands-on, entrepreneurial spirit.

Lutz was visiting his mother at her farm in Vermont, still trying to figure out his future, when a disaster for her became a green light for his dreams.

Loggers hired to thin out some woodland mistakenly clear-cut the land. The ground was littered with branches and trunks of young white cedars, wood too scrawny to haul to the mill.

“The light bulb went off,” Lutz recalls.

He went about replicating his chair design, substituting white cedar for bamboo. Every aspect of the undertaking was an experiment. “It wasn’t like I had a pattern to go off of,” he says, “and I didn’t have any traditional training.”

Getting the seat to perform to his expectations “took a lot of iterations.” But would the design appeal to others? New England craft shows provided the forums he needed – a low cost of entry and lots of potential customers in a short time.

The chairs sold out at his first show. Lutz was on to something.

“Doing the craft show circuit allowed me to get customer feedback,” he says. “You have 10 seconds, and in those 10 seconds, customers will tell you a lot, if you listen. I had three years of focus groups. That face-to-face, direct feedback was invaluable in helping us develop what we have today.”

Pros: “The uniqueness. The comfort. There’s no rigid support. They love that aspect.”

Divided opinions: “They take their hand and feel the bark. Some people loved that and some people didn’t.”

Cons: “The first chairs I made were massive. I’m 6 ft. 4 in., about 220 pounds. So the first furniture I made was for myself. A woman would sit down, and her feet couldn’t touch the ground. I had to constantly scale them down to the average-size person.”

Lutz stuck with the craft-show circuit, adding the Philadelphia Flower Show and The Big E, a regional fair in Massachusetts. The chairs continued to sell well.

An employee uses a hydraulic jig to hold parts in place as he weaves them into a seat.

One early craft show customer was Carolyn Rafaelian, a Rhode Island jewelry artisan and entrepreneur who is CEO of the trendy Alex and Ani brand. Rafaelian later purchased 200 Vermont Cedar Chairs for another of her ventures, Carolyn’s Sakonnet Vineyard. Lutz says the chef there swears food and drink sales went up after the chairs appeared. Customers, he tells Lutz, get comfortable, linger longer, and spend more.

In late 2013, Lutz took his chairs to a home show in Boston where they caught the attention of Brian Mattei (pronounced matty). The two men hit it off instantly. Mattei, whose prior experience included overseeing a national sales organization for an Italian commercial equipment maker, saw potential.

Lutz recalls him saying, “I’m a salesman. This is what I do. I’d really like to take it on.” Mattei is now director of sales and Lutz’s number-one cheerleader.

Off & Running

The business started by Lutz and his wife, Sarah Cooke, was reconfigured to become the Vermont Cedar Chair Co. The firm operates from a 4,000 sq. ft. facility in Hardwick, Vermont. The unincorporated village (population 3,010) is about 25 miles northeast of Montpelier, the capital.

All the white cedar is harvested by hand from stands within a 30-mile radius of Hardwick. A video on the company website explains that only trees with a trunk diameter of four in. or less are felled. This thinning process creates a better environment for the larger trees to fully mature.

The company currently employs a production team of five. Each chair is built by hand, starting with choosing each piece of timber. Workers select pieces of similar size for the uprights, for the seat, and for the back.

Irregularities, such as where smaller branches forked off, are smoothed away, leaving each piece mostly covered in bark. Only the curved bases for the rocker are milled and shaped to uniform dimensions.

The crew can produce an average of 20 chairs a day, Lutz says.

“By the end of the year we’re hoping to double that,” he says. “The nice thing about this process is that it is easily scalable. It’s a simple process, and there are a lot of guys looking for work.”

Chairs are fully assembled at the factory to check fit and quality before being broken down to ship flat. Reassembling the mortise-and-tenon components takes about 15 minutes, Lutz says. “We give the retailers glue and everything they need to put it together. A guy can do four of them an hour; your cost to assemble a chair is only about five bucks.”

Left in the elements, the cedar bark weathers to a silvery gray (envision the gray cedar shingles on a coastal Maine cottage). The rope, imported from the Philippines, is said to be one of the most rot-resistant natural fibers on earth. It’s the same material as used on generations on sea-going vessels.

The company confidently gives its rustic cedar and manila furniture a lifetime warranty. If an item proves unsatisfactory, the website says, “No questions asked, just return it to us and we will send you a new one.”

The entrepreneurs acknowledge that challenges loom ahead, yet they remain confident in their ability to produce goods and manage growth. The company has signed on more than 100 retailers, Mattei says, and they soon will have additional products to sell.

Stacked, wrapped and ready to go.

A line of furniture made of dimensional lumber, called Acadia, will join the original rustic line. Acadia, initially available only in unfinished white cedar, features the same suspension seat design. Lutz says he has applied for U.S. patents to protect his designs.

The original rustic line, Lutz says, “was too different for some people’s décor.” He expects Acadia to “appeal to a much larger market.”

Products in the Acadia line can be produced much more quickly because the components are uniform. Those savings will be passed on to retailers and consumers, Lutz says.

He expects the Acadia line to be available in colors later in the year. In keeping with the company’s environmental sensitivity, he’s exploring using whey-based coatings made by another Vermont company.

Imports from Vietnam

Lutz has contracted with a Vietnamese company to produce his designs in a bamboo version. The first container of bamboo furniture is expected in the first quarter of this year. A California logistics company will manage warehousing and shipping.

Lutz has created a separate business, Bamboo Chair Company, for this line. The variety of bamboo used, he says, is quite dense and lacks the hollow core often associated with bamboo. “This allows the joints to be much stronger,” Lutz says.

With the rustic Vermont Cedar Chair, the Acadia line, and the bamboo line, Lutz says the products hit three critical price points. A Vermont Cedar rocker retails for about $395. An Acadia rocker retails for about $299. A rocker from Bamboo Chair Company will sell for about $200. Small tables, stationary chairs and other items round out each collection.

A line of teak furniture, also incorporating the suspension-seat design with modifications, will be launched at the Casual Market in September. The furniture will be produced in Vietnam by a firm that Lutz first encountered at the 2014 Casual Market.

“Every porch and patio place has teak,” Mattei says, “and we want a piece of it.”

Meanwhile, the initial design is winning over retailers and their customers.

“If we can get people to sit in the chair, they’re sold,” says Molly Gunsolus, store manager at Mountain Top Furniture in Blairsville, Georgia. “They are shocked at just how comfortable the chairs are. Our customers love the chairs.”

The quest to perfect his chair design and build a business has taught Lutz many lessons, including one with a personal twist.

He was aware that a dining suite in his mother’s home had been in the family for quite some time. What he hadn’t realized is that the furniture was made by a firm once owned by his forebears – Grand Rapids Chair Co.

“It lasted until the 1970s,” Lutz says, “but I didn’t know about it until I started making furniture. It’s in my blood.”