Designed it. Hit a wall.
Built the fix.

About Datafurn: from made-to-order furniture to CNC shop software.

One chair, endless variations. Winston, our founder, designed it to make made-to-order furniture more accessible. But the tools he found couldn’t configure or catalogue the variations. So he built his own, with design rules bounding each choice.

Datafurn brings that approach to the shop floor. Your CNC machine, material and tooling limits, held as data, and every new size checked against what your shop has recorded.

Origin

In 2019, Winston exhibited a configurable chair at the London Design Festival. Demand was there. The infrastructure to sell and make it wasn’t.

So he built it. At Saw & Sew, each configuration was bounded by design rules before the model was generated. The approach ran in production.

Datafurn adds the production side: a CNC manufacturer’s machine, material and tooling limits, held as data, with parametric products checked against them at the design stage. Selecting a location can also retrieve local production services and their limits, so each design is checked against the shop that will make it. How Datafurn works

“Ten years ago, I had conviction: made-to-order is about efficiency, not luxury. But when I designed a product with infinite variations, I hit a wall: the software stack to support this didn’t exist. So I pivoted to build it myself, realising its most profound impact sits on the factory floor.”

Winston Ferguson, Founder

Mission

Connect digital design directly to machine execution to make custom, distributed production commercially viable.

Vision

Zero-waste, flexible manufacturing that scales true design individuality.

Values

1. Look forward

Strategy: where you go

Focuses energy on building modern, software-defined infrastructure rather than patching legacy CAD/CAM workflows.

2. Be pragmatic

Execution: how you work

Keeps execution grounded in shop-floor reality, real job-shop economics and working code over market hype.

3. Keep balance

Culture: how you make decisions

Holds creative design freedom and rigid physical machine constraints in harmony.

At a glance

What it does

Parametric products checked against a CNC shop’s recorded machines, tools and stock at the design stage, and generated with the shop’s materials at their measured thicknesses.

Company

Datafurn Ltd, a UK software company based in London. Registered in England and Wales, company no. 16623948. Not affiliated with DataFurn, the EU-funded furniture analytics platform.

Founder

Winston Ferguson

Stage

Pre-seed and in development. Raising our first round and recruiting 3–5 CNC manufacturers for the Stage 1 pilot.

Machine code for supported 3-axis flatbed routers, planned.

Get in touch

CNC manufacturers: apply for a pilot and we’ll arrange a 15-minute call. Partners and researchers working on PLM, configurators or distributed production: email winston@datafurn.com.