British upholstery company Maker&Son arrived stateside this year with its all-natural sofas, chairs and beds—and big plans to upend the traditional direct-to-consumer business model for selling furniture.

When Alex Willcock and his son Felix Conran set out to create a sustainable sofa, they did so with a wide-ranging vision of what it means to design an environmentally sound product. “It’s not just about what it’s made from—it’s how it’s made, where it’s made, and how long it’s going to last,” explains Willcock. “When we started designing, one of the things we said is that we want people’s children to fight over [our sofas] when they’ve gone.”

Ultimately, product development took Willcock and Conran more than two years. “It wasn’t just the materials, it was about getting to a point that you could combine all of those in the right way,” says Willcock. Cushions are stuffed with ethically sourced feathers (a byproduct of the meat industry) around a sturdy latex core; the solid, skirted base is spring-loaded and made of sustainably sourced hardwoods. Producing the arm of each sofa without plastics, polyurethane foams, velcro or staples requires a painstaking process of shaping the piece with layers of cotton, wool and natural fibers. “You’ve got the cost of the raw materials, and you’ve got the human power [required] to make that whole thing happen,” says Willcock. “We decided that we were not going to engineer to a price point. Instead, we decided to engineer it to be the most comfortable thing that we have ever sat in, and then figure out what that costs.”