We keep the things we're fond of. We're fond of the things we keep. The two directions of that statement are equally true, and the relationship between them is not incidental — attachment to an object and the act of keeping it are mutually reinforcing.
We named this company Fonds because of that idea, and because of a second one. In archival science, a fonds is a collection of records that belong together because they share a common origin — defined not by content but by provenance: where it came from. Provenance is what turns an object into an heirloom.
What provenance means for furniture
A piece of furniture with provenance is one whose history can be traced. Auction houses and estate dealers know this instinctively: a Stickley side chair with a paper label on the underside and a documented history of ownership is worth more than an identical chair with no such record — not because the chair is different, but because its story is recoverable.
Most new furniture has no provenance. It ships from a warehouse, is assembled in an apartment, and exists in a kind of historical void until it is donated or discarded. Nobody signed it. Nobody dated it. If it outlasts its original owner — which most modern furniture will not — there is no record of who first sat beside it or what room it stood in.
Provenance is what turns an object into an heirloom.
The embossed label on the underside of the Fonds side table exists to solve this problem. When you sign it and write the date, you are giving the table a beginning — a specific person, a specific moment. If the table is kept, that record travels with it. Whoever owns it next knows not just what it is made of, but who claimed it first.
The logic of the label
We put the label on the underside of the lower shelf deliberately. It is not visible in normal use. It is there for the moments when someone picks the table up — when it is moved, when it is passed on, when someone turns it over to look at what it is made of. In those moments, the label does something that no amount of branding on the exterior could do. It says: this specific table belonged to a specific person on a specific day.
There is a tradition of this in art. Prints are signed in pencil in the lower margin — not the printed image, but the hand of the artist, in a space set aside for it. Photographs are sometimes signed on the verso. Books are inscribed on the title page. In each case, the signature is not the work itself; it is a record of the relationship between the maker and the made thing, or the owner and the owned thing.
The Fonds label is in that tradition. You are not the maker of the table in the sense that you designed or milled it. But you are its author in the sense that matters: you completed it, you claimed it, and you recorded that claim.
Six tables
The first production run is six pieces. Each will be signed by its owner. Each will stand in a different room, accumulate different use, develop a slightly different patina as the oak responds to its particular environment of light and humidity.
In twenty years, the six tables will be six distinct objects — related by design, differentiated by history. That is what provenance does. It makes objects specific. It gives them a past.