Reddie: The furniture brand championing reclaimed timber and Asian manufacturing

There’s a bias in the Australian design industry that rarely gets named, but shows up all the same. For Reddie co-founder Caroline Olah, it surfaced early – in the slight hesitation she noticed when she spoke about where her furniture was made. A reaction that suggested quality still had a geography.

Rather than sidestep that response, Olah and her husband, Andrew, built their furniture brand around it, grounding it in that exact point of tension – the way the label “made in Asia” continues to be perceived within the Australian design landscape.

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As a half-Indonesian, half-Australian designer, she saw no reason to separate authorship from making, even as others in the industry did.

“I am proud of both sides of my heritage, and I wanted to celebrate both Australian design and our incredible Indonesian makers from the very beginning,” she says. “When we launched over 10 years ago, I’d see a look of disappointment when I mentioned we were Indonesian-made – as if Western-made was the only benchmark.”

Challenging that perception has defined Reddie’s trajectory. Before founding the brand, Olah worked as an interior architect and identified a more practical gap.

“There was a lack of versatility with products, as you couldn’t tailor items by material and size to suit your projects,” Olah says. “I needed something in between off-the-shelf and custom.”

At the same time, the market leaned heavily on mass production, with limited focus on reuse. Reddie began as a way to address those constraints, creating furniture that could be adapted and made from reclaimed materials, primarily timber. To do that properly, the business required control over production, which led it to establish its own workshop in northern Java.

“The town we are in is by the ocean, with an incredible heritage of hand-craftsmanship and woodworking,” she says.

Owning the factory meant they could move away from static inventory and towards a made-to-order model, while ensuring the conditions and care behind each piece matched the values they were putting forward.

Working with 100 per cent reclaimed timber defines the brand’s pace and process. Materials are sourced from old buildings and construction waste, then reworked by hand – a method that demands more time and skill, but produces a different outcome.

“The material is inherently more difficult to work with,” Olah explains, noting that nails must be removed manually and each piece crafted through hands-on making. That constraint carries through to Reddie’s design process, where it is shaped less by trends than by what is needed and what the material allows.

“If someone tells us there is a gap in the market, like a lack of comfortable wooden stools with backs, that becomes our next brief,” she says.

“I always start by sketching the initial ideas. From there, concepts are run past our sales team, who are all ex-interior designers, for their input on form and marketability,” Olah says. “Next, our factory team weighs in on the structural integrity, often adding touches of traditional Javanese craftsmanship.”

Still, the question of perception remains. While attitudes towards manufacturing in Asia have shifted, Olah is clear that recognition hasn’t caught up.

“People are becoming more open,” she says, “but for me, acceptance isn’t enough,” pointing to a hierarchy that continues to position Western production as the benchmark.

For Olah, the issue isn’t where something is made, but how it’s valued. “Asian craftsmanship has existed for centuries, and these artisans mastered their craft long before brands began manufacturing in the region,” she says.

“It hurts me when an Asian-made product is world-class, yet its origins are intentionally concealed,” she adds.

More than a decade on, Reddie continues to operate with clarity around where and how its furniture is made.

“I want every brand manufacturing in Asia to step up and be ‘Proudly Made in Asia’,” Olah says, not as a provocation, but as a necessary correction.