Get to Know Cococo

By Hollie Deese

Steve and Danielle Sechrest make aspirational furniture. Beautiful, custom pieces in classic styles in materials that scream luxury. They know what they provide is not inexpensive, and in many cases people have been dreaming about a piece for years before finally pulling the trigger.

“We respect that,” Steve says. “That’s important.”

Most likely because the couple built the company themselves from scratch, almost out of necessity.

“We had no money,” Steve says. “We were kind of broke, and the great recession had wiped us out, so we were just looking for something to do, and trying to survive.”

Danielle was working for a little furniture company, and Steve approached some of the makers he met if they would mind if he tried to sell some of their furniture online. Still a somewhat new concept at that point, he began selling some of it on Ebay.

They called it the Comfortable Couch Company and built a little website. It wasn’t long before they changed the name to Cococo Home and have been on a steady growth curve eight years later.

“I think have built ourselves a little niche as a company that makes high quality furniture,” Steve says. “We’re rare in that we’re a complete vertical integration. There’s very few furniture companies selling their own furniture. Most are in a wholesale or retail kind of environment. We’ve never really done that.”

Until they partnered with Nashville’s Royal Circus.

“It’s one of the first times we’ve tried having somebody else show our furniture. We’re excited to see where this goes,” he says.

Steve attributes their success to not trying to outthink their customers, with some of their most successful styles coming out from their initial suggestions, focusing on classic shapes but in unexpected colors, lengths and depths.

“We try not to be the arbiters of taste, but rather let our customers go where they want to go with it. So we do a lot of traditional styles for instance, but maybe in bright, bold leather colors, or beautiful velvets, or things that maybe are against type. I think more than anything that’s fueled our growth, that we try to be very responsive to what our customers want.”

When creating the pieces they try to use as many local products as possible, manufacturing the furniture from the frame up using wood that is sustainably grown. Most of the components for the springs and cushions are all locally made in North Carolina.

Most of the fabrics are woven in the United States, like the JB Martin velvets woven in South Carolina. Their leathers however, are mostly from Morgan Giles sourced out of Italy. The hides come from all over the world, but I think Morgan Giles does a better job with color and textures, and things like that, than probably any other leather company.

“That’s been a natural fit for us, and they have lines of leather that may have 40 colors in them, that are just exquisite. It allows us to get that range of options for our customers,” Steve says.

And it is all those quality materials, the detail in the design and care in production that come together to make a Cococo couch so comfortable, and that holds up over time.

On Saturday, February 2, meet Steve and Danielle Sechrest in person at Royal Circus, 438 Houston Street, 2-5 p.m. to learn more about Cococo.