I spent most of my career in Asia, working across business operations and consulting in a part of the world where you develop a sharp eye for what's made well and what isn't.

On a trip to Europe I decided to buy a sailboat. I went back a year later and did. After a refit in northern Italy, a friend and I sailed it home to Asia. Yacht ownership is a crash course in what holds up at sea and in the sun and what doesn't. A few years later I carried out a full restoration of the deck. If you've ever watched a teak deck being laid, the rows of fresh golden planks going down one by one, you understand why it's been preferred by serious boat builders for centuries.

When I came back to the US and started looking at outdoor furniture, the options were disappointing. Wrong materials for the climate, long waits on orders, and not much worth looking at twice. I thought outdoor furniture deserved the same thinking that goes into a well built boat. Products that perform, proportions that look right, and stock that's ready when someone wants it.

That's what we're building at Fairlead in South Florida. —Matt