Colby Murphy traded the armed forces for the woodshop, but his interest in handcrafting began much earlier. As a kid, he grew up building cars and playing with metal fabrication in his machinist father’s garage. “I like building things; I always have,” he says. Yet it remained a hobby. Upon graduating from high school, Murphy joined the Marine Corps, where he served for about six years. Afterward, he went to engineering school before bouncing around the service industry as a bartender. Throughout it all, making things was always in the back of his mind.
Then in 2016, he decided to take a chance and turned his hobby into a business with the launch of SouthLoft Crafted Concepts in Dallas. “To make the full leap over to it—to quit my job and everything—I think it was the challenge component of it [that pushed me,] to see if I could sustain life on my own creating income for myself and my family,” he says. “It obviously came with stressors, like anything like that would, but I kind of said, ‘Screw it. I’m just going to try this out and see what happens.’ That was about 10 years ago, and we’re still standing.” Murphy gained the skills he needed for furniture production largely through trial and error. Now his company employs eight craftsmen and makes custom furniture for homes, restaurants, workplaces and hotels across the country.
Murphy takes a collaborative approach when designing pieces for clients, who can request anything from tables and chairs to desks and shelving units, as well as customize every detail from the wood finish to the shape of the base. They may send him inspirational images to get the creative juices flowing, but most commissions begin with a conversation. “It’s really client dependent. Sometimes the feedback we get is like, ‘This is just an idea. You can do anything you want,’ so we just start playing with stuff,” he says. They look at imagery online and experiment with shapes in CAD. “I’m a firm believer [that] everything’s already been done. [We take] things as inspiration and then just completely tweak it, or just try to get an original idea using multiple avenues,” he explains. “At the end of the day, it’s what the client wants, so [it’s just about] playing that game.”
A favorite piece of his is the Parametric bench, a curved wooden wonder. “It’s probably one of the most artistic pieces that we’ve done—I guess the term would be living art,” he says. “It was a bench that people could actually sit on, and it was a lot of fun.” Murphy enjoys shaping pieces by hand to play with form, and the bench was born out of that experimentation. Along with more artistic collections, his brand creates traditional table, chair and desk designs for commercial and residential clients.
SouthLoft will soon be moving into a new building that is three times the size of their current headquarters, offering more space for new machinery, fabrication techniques and product lines. “Success, to me, is a constant battle, because you have new struggles every single day,” says Murphy. “Bad things happen every day. You’ve got to put out fires left and right. But I think overall, success is knowing that I have a team that I can support, and they’re busy, and they enjoy what they’re doing. We’ve created a place that is artistic in nature and we are able to come up with new ideas.”
