Sunny Ray sits down with Tino, founder of Baru, a startup reinventing the design build industry by digitally connecting design with localized manufacturing. Born in Indonesia and raised in Michigan as the eldest of four, Tino built an early career in fashion and advertising photography, running Exile Productions across Detroit, Los Angeles, Paris and Italy for twelve years. He later pursued economics and finance, earning degrees from the University of Michigan and Indiana University, and worked in investment banking, turnarounds, and corporate finance, eventually overseeing a 1.2 billion dollar BASF business unit. Frustrated by the medieval process of getting a custom bookcase built, Tino began investigating why cabinet and furniture manufacturing had failed to modernize. He founded Baru to link idle CNC machines nationwide into a virtual factory, using dynamically priced, manufacturing ready digital designs. The conversation covers his patented AR and VR technology, a validating 70,000 dollar sale to Google employees during the pandemic, the economics behind 40 percent cost savings, tariffs and reshoring tailwinds, and his five year vision to disrupt mass production supply chains built on the Henry Ford model.
An Indonesian immigrant turned finance executive is using CNC machines and AR/VR to disrupt custom cabinet manufacturing.
You were born in Indonesia, raised in Michigan as the eldest of four, with a physician father. What was the dinner table like?
My childhood was pretty rebellious, so I felt beyond high school very early on and became independent rapidly. Dad left at six and came home at seven or eight, mom held it together with my siblings, but I was doing my own thing for a huge amount of time. I was always passionate about something, whether it was World War II books in fourth grade or photography in middle school.
You started Exile Productions at 18 in advertising production. How do you start a company with no playbook?
A scholarship sent me to Europe, and in Paris I walked into a big fashion studio and asked to work for free. The owner liked the price and happened to be from Detroit, so I worked at Click Clack Studios rubbing elbows with fashion greats like Helmut Newton. When I came back I enrolled in art school but saw such a disconnect from what I'd seen in Paris that I dropped out and started freelancing as a photo assistant, eventually becoming a full producer.
You were CFO of a 1.2 billion dollar BASF unit, then quit to build a furniture marketplace. Walk me through that decision.
I was only there temporarily while the business unit CFO was on medical leave. When I left, I wanted a custom bookcase for my house and was so frustrated by the experience that I started investigating why the woodworking industry was so backwards. I'd been taking my sons to Maker Faire for ten years and saw digital manufacturing evolving everywhere except cabinet making, so that curiosity led me to look at the industry seriously.
You've called custom manufacturing medieval. What specifically shocked you?
There was no digital continuity. Finding a custom cabinet maker was word of mouth, you'd knock on a garage door in some industrial park and hope you could trust whoever answered. It started with pencil drawings and went back and forth for weeks or months until everyone agreed on a look and a price. I kept asking why we couldn't go directly from screen to machine the way 3D printing works, since the technology existed but nobody was deploying it.
What's the one moment you knew Baru was real and not just a finance guy's side project?
As a solo founder I had parametrically engineered custom desks online, and in March 2020 Google called asking if I'd give their employees a discount as they set up home offices. We sold 70,000 dollars of desks and had them manufactured in a dozen metro areas using the same machine instructions process. That was the proof of concept that this could actually work.
The pitch is roughly 40 percent cost savings by killing long-distance shipping and inventory. Where does that money actually go?
About 60 percent of cost of sales is distribution, which is roughly 40 percent of revenues. We eliminate that by making local manufacturers accessible at the machine level instead of going through traditional full-service custom cabinet makers, whose processes are inherently inefficient. By making the process self-service and fully digitized, the savings happen at the activity level for the architect, designer, or customer.
With tariffs and reshoring, your thesis got handed a tailwind. What changed for you in the last 18 months?
Honestly not very much. We're still very bootstrappy. I was in Atlanta and Philadelphia trying to get the sales flywheel moving, and the construction industry is very conservative and averse to change, so it was a struggle. Last summer I moved back to San Francisco because people here aren't afraid of innovation, it just prompts curious conversations, and those conversations lead to sales.
Five years out, what does Baru look like, and what does manufacturing look like because Baru exists?
We'll be in the top 100 metro areas, which represent about 250 million Americans and 7.5 million residential kitchen remodels. Doing just 1 percent of those at 15,000 dollars each takes our topline to 1.1 billion, with 400 million ours to redeploy. We'll likely be in more categories than cabinetry by then. Ultimately I want to eliminate mass production supply chains, because if 60 percent of cost of sales is wasted on distribution, the whole model is flawed.
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