There are a lot of market issues with this; I just don't see this working. It's not as if CNC and automation processes are new to the furniture industry, especi

There are a lot of market issues with this; I just don't see this working. It's not as if CNC and automation processes are new to the furniture industry, especially for small-scale furniture makers. Even once you automate a good deal of the production costs, there is still additional labor, materials, and expertise required. First of all, CNC machined plywood is not sufficient for anything other than workshop-grade furniture (as in, furniture you'd use in your workshop). You need -- at a minimum: - Edging applied to protect against splinters and damage to the veneer. - A finish/varnish/veneer to protect the surfaces against damage/dirt/warping. Those things involve additional semi-skilled labor and cost. On top of that, people don't usually want raw wood furniture, which means that you need different kinds of veneers and surfaces, which increases material costs and complexity. On top of that, you're unlikely to be able to produce purely "slot constructed" furniture of any appreciable complexity. You're going to need joints. This significantly increases the costs of the machinery/tooling/design required. Now that you've added additional materials, labor, and more complex end-user construction, your costs have gone up as well. On top of this, your production facilities need to figure out how to efficiently ship these one-off flat-pack low-end creations to your end users. Congratulations, you're competing with Ikea, and Ikea has the cheap flat-pack mass-production process down to a science. If you start trying to scale up to more high-end furniture production, you now have more problems. First of all, what's described here is essentially already how furniture (and clothing, and electronics) production works, just without the "crowd sourcing". Designers, production facilities, and brand management companies come together to produce furniture for sale in retail outlets. The problem is that each entity in the chain (design -> production -> sale) does a lot more than operate automated machinery. The machinery itself is not the major expense. The trained labor, raw materials, stock, distribution, storage, and sale of the products are where the complexity come in. The place where you find efficiencies is in either doing this at scale, not doing this one-off. When you order a piece of furniture from a high-end company, it will be dropped into the production queue, shipped via freight some time later along with a huge batch of other furniture, distributed to large warehouses near major cities, and then pushed out to a subcontracted or directly managed furniture freight delivery service. Trying to do this on a non-local, distributed, crowd-source bases via UPS will not be cheaper. The only way to do this for an equivalent price is to buy furniture made, designed, and often delivered by local furniture makers. They tend to have their own workshops containing things like CNC machines, or already have access to those machines through shared workshops. Insofar as they require less skilled labor to assemble the work, they already have it.