Ohio Hardwood Market highlights area’s innovation
The 2025 Ohio Hardwood Market Show at Mt. Hope Auction April 1-2 featured the best and most innovative hardwood furniture Amish Country has built this past year.
Holmes County has become well known for its unique wood furniture, which is always valued for its impressive quality of work, so it seems ideal that a show the size and magnitude of the Ohio Hardwood Market would be centered in the heart of Amish Country.
When it comes to creating quality furniture that is aesthetically pleasing and sturdy enough to last for generations, few areas can match the quality and beauty of hardwood furniture built in Ohio’s Amish Country.
The 2025 Ohio Hardwood Market Show at Mt. Hope Auction April 1-2 created the ideal place for any business entity involved with the hardwood furniture market, from designing and building furniture to transporting it, to showcase the brightest and most innovative and stunning hardwood furniture in the market today.
According to Kendrick Mullet, executive director of Ohio Furniture Guild, which hosts the event, the show was created to honor local furniture craftsmen by giving wholesale buyers from all over the nation the chance to purchase incomparable Amish-crafted furniture and to meet the craftsmen behind the pieces.
The words “all over the nation” are extremely appropriate when describing this event, with entrepreneurs from 40 states paying a visit to the show.
The Ohio Hardwood Market is exclusively for wholesale buyers looking to fill their showrooms with furniture pieces built with passion, detail and intentionality, and the 2025 market featured 173 exhibitors displaying the best hardwood furniture Amish Country has to offer.
“I believe we are leading the entire country in design for domestically made furniture,” Mullet said. “We hear that all the time from stores.”
How big was the show?
Mullet said they brought in more than 3,000 pieces of furniture from 175 vendors in one day, an effort that took the work of dozens of volunteers.
“It’s an amazing effort by a lot of people, and we’re so grateful for everyone who helped make this a reality,” Mullet said.
The OHM afforded wholesale buyers the opportunity to visit the show and purchase items, gain valuable insight on trends and new ideas in furniture, and most importantly, make connections and develop relationships that could help build and grow their companies.
Mullet said the importance of this event can’t be stressed enough because it brings so many people together and creates avenues of building communication and relationships between partners coast to coast.
“For almost all of these vendors, this is the only event of the year they do, and to have these store owners come to the event and build relationships is extremely important,” Mullet said.
The show featured vendors in both the huge expo center and the Dean Beachy Memorial Building, both packed with woodworking companies, and if something is made of wood or has to do with designing furniture, making furniture and even transporting furniture, it could be found in this dynamic show.
One of the biggest drawing cards for the event is the impressive Showcase House, a makeshift house built right inside the expo center that featured the finest, most prestigious pieces of hardwood furniture, award-winning pieces of furniture that were handpicked from 100s of entries from a panel of professionals.
“We have 200 local businesses in the woodworking industry that submitted their top designs in furniture in 34 categories, and it all began last June,” Mullet said. “We had 10 judges in November go through 432 entries.”
They narrowed it down to the top pieces in each category and those winning entries were then featured inside the Showcase House, where typical rooms like dining rooms, kitchens, dens, bedrooms, living rooms and even nursery rooms were created, an effort that included coordinating all of the art deco and accessories that highlighted each piece of furniture.
In addition, the OHM teamed up with Sherwin Williams to work with the newest and most popular colors driving the market.
The tours through the home with professionals like Sadie Beachy of S. Flynn Design and Maggie O’Hare from Sherwin Williams were given to visiting wholesalers, with the professionals providing keen insight into the flow and design of each room.
“What you would see in the Showcase House features all of these beautiful award-winning pieces of furniture,” Mullet said.
He said Beachy, O’Hare, Laura Fox of Laura Fox Interiors and Sierra Beachy of SB Designs all collaborated in making the Showcase House blossom into a gorgeous home featuring some fantastic pieces.
“They picked out all of the décor, and Sherwin Williams painted the house to color coordinate everything,” Mullet said. “This house inspires our buyers to always be cutting edge and gives retail buyers a chance to walk through to experience how incredible and inventive Ohio furniture can look like.”
For those businesses that were selected as award winners for the Showcase House, to be honored in that way meant a lot.
Jay Hershberger, owner of Hershy Way of Berlin, had two pieces selected, including an end table and an outdoor picnic table set.
He said it’s a challenge to come up with new ideas that are both functional and beautiful, and there’s only one way to do so.
“We have to work together as a group,” Hershberger said. “What you see as the end result isn’t the first piece. The first piece and probably a lot more are gone in the burn pile. It takes time and effort to design something new, and we always try to be creative.”
Lester Wengerd of Farmstead Acres in Fredericksburg also had a chair selected and said it was an honor.
“It’s always a challenge, and we are very grateful to the guild for helping us promote not only our furniture but our community as a whole,” Wengerd said.
Not only was the house filled with character, innovation and beauty, both buildings held countless pieces of hardwood furniture that showcased the very best Amish Country furniture builders have to offer in driving the hardwood furniture business on a national level.