Marshall B. Lloyd’s woven furniture.

The story Lloyd Flanders tells about itself starts long before the company carried that name. On its own about page, the company says Marshall B. Lloyd opened the Lloyd Manufacturing Company in Menominee, Michigan, in 1906, and that he developed his Lloyd Loom process for making wicker furniture in 1916, with the process patented in 1917. English Wikipedia’s article on Lloyd Loom gives the same patent year and describes the material as machine-woven wicker made from tightly twisted kraft paper reinforced with wire.

Before the loom, Lloyd was already an inventor of weaving machinery. Michigan Blue magazine, in a February 2016 profile of the company by Kim Schneider, reported that he first patented a machine for weaving table mats, then machines for weaving wire spring mattresses and wire wheels for baby carriages, all of them manufactured in Menominee. The same article says it was in Menominee that he worked out the method of weaving wicker that the company still uses. Wicker baby buggies were among the early products of Lloyd’s business, according to English Wikipedia’s Heywood-Wakefield article, which says Lloyd had developed a process for making woven furniture such as baby buggies.

The Lloyd Loom name also travelled abroad. English Wikipedia says Lloyd sold the British rights to his process in 1921 to W. Lusty & Sons, which began production in 1922. That British line has a separate history from the American one, and the Lloyd Loom label in Britain refers to Lusty’s furniture rather than to the Michigan company. For anyone researching the brand, it helps to keep the two apart: the Menominee works and the Lusty licence share an inventor and a process, but not an owner.

Heywood-Wakefield, then the Flanders family.

In 1921 Lloyd Manufacturing was bought by the Heywood-Wakefield Company, the wicker and furniture maker, according to English Wikipedia’s Heywood-Wakefield article, which also notes that 1921 was the year that company took the Heywood-Wakefield name. For several decades the Menominee factory was therefore part of a larger furniture business based elsewhere.

The next change came in 1982. The company’s about page says Don and Dudley Flanders bought the Lloyd Manufacturing works from Heywood-Wakefield that year and began making loom furniture durable enough for outdoor use. The same page says Lloyd Flanders was formed in 1982 by Flanders Manufacturing of Fort Smith, Arkansas. English Wikipedia’s Lloyd Loom article describes the same event in slightly different words, saying production resumed in Menominee in 1982 after Flanders Industries bought the Lloyd Manufacturing works, forming the Lloyd Flanders company; its Heywood-Wakefield article likewise says the former Lloyd facilities were sold to Flanders Industries in 1982. The company’s page uses the name Flanders Manufacturing; the Wikipedia articles use Flanders Industries.

The shift to outdoor use is the part of the story that defines the brand today. Lloyd Flanders describes its woven pieces as all-weather wicker, and on its about page it lists Lloyd Loom, woven vinyl and teak among its materials. In the 2016 Michigan Blue profile, vice president of sales Warren Juliano described the weatherproofing as the notable modern advance and compared the care of the furniture to that of a car: a piece left fully outside needs washing more often than one kept under cover.

The company says its products are made in Menominee. Its about page gives the headquarters as Menominee, Michigan, and describes its Lloyd Loom products as made in America. Michigan Blue reported in 2016 that the Menominee plant was still where construction took place, that many employees had parents or grandparents who had worked there, and that each lounge chair passes through many hands over a week-long process, according to Juliano. English Wikipedia’s Lloyd Loom article states that Lloyd Flanders continues to make Lloyd Loom furniture in Menominee.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group are all American outdoor furniture makers. Outdoor furniture brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family workshops that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to much larger furniture groups, and a single name can be sold through garden shops, specialist dealers, design showrooms and hotel contracts at once.

An outdoor furniture brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single chair than by a material, a way of building and a run of named collections, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its factories or begun sourcing parts from elsewhere since it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its frames, weaves and cushions are actually made and finished.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its furniture is made and how its collections have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Collections, colours and the porch.

The visual identity of Lloyd Flanders rests less on a single logo than on the look of the woven pieces themselves. The tight, regular weave that the loom produces is the brand’s most recognisable surface, and the company sells it in a range of finishes and fabric choices across its collections. Michigan Blue named Reflections, which it said the company introduced in 1986, as a long-running line of porch rockers, lounge chairs and love seats, and also mentioned the Generations and Nantucket collections. The magazine reported that each collection can move from a classic cottage look to an “urban loft” look depending on the colour and fabric chosen, and a Suttons Bay furniture retailer quoted in the piece said customers valued the wide choice of colours and fabrics and the washed finishes.

That flexibility shapes how the brand presents itself. Product photography tends to put the furniture on porches, decks and lakeside settings, which fits the company’s Great Lakes home and the heritage it describes on its about page. The name itself is a joined record of the two halves of the history: Lloyd for the inventor and his loom, Flanders for the family that bought the works in 1982. Juliano told Michigan Blue that the company’s main market was ordinary families who would pass the furniture down, and he described the pieces as generational furniture, a phrase that matches the heritage-led way the brand talks about itself.

The company has also kept the Lloyd Loom process at the centre of its story rather than treating it as an archive. Its about page speaks of making Lloyd Loom products in Menominee today, alongside woven vinyl and teak, so the heritage process and the modern all-weather range sit in the same catalogue. The 1917 patent and the current outdoor collections are presented as one continuous story, told from the same town.

For a design guide, Lloyd Flanders shows how a manufacturing process can become the identity: the woven texture, the Menominee address and the joined family name do the work that a logo does elsewhere. Compare it with Woodard, another long-established American outdoor maker, and with Dedon, whose identity is also built around woven outdoor fibre. For this guide we use porch green, woven cream and kraft tan with a warm serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Lloyd Flanders’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.