In 1996, Spintex Road was more bush than boulevard, and a young joiner from Sekondi named Daniel Kwaku Mensah rented a shed on it. He had two apprentices, a borrowed planer, and a sign that read God First Furniture Works. His promise to customers was simple: everything leaving the shed would outlive the man who made it.
The pew years
The first big order, in 1999, was pews and lecterns for a chapel in Teshie. Churches are unsentimental clients — pews take more sitting than any sofa ever will — and those pews are still in service. For the next two decades the workshop never advertised. Finished furniture was the advertisement.
An apprenticeship, not a job
From 2009 the training that had always happened informally became a proper apprenticeship: four years at the bench, starting with sharpening, ending with final finishing. More than forty craftsmen have come through it. Several master carpenters on our floor today were teenagers when they first swept it.
The second generation
In 2014 Daniel's daughter Efua Mensah joined after studying industrial design at KNUST. She brought drawings where there had been memory, prototypes where there had been habit, and eventually a catalogue — the pieces you see on this site carry her lines and her father's joinery. In 2018 the workshop invested in its own kiln, and in 2021 the family made the change customers had gently suggested for years: the workshop took the name of the wood it trusted most. Odum Furniture. Same hands, a new name.
Thirty years, and the doors open
In 2024 we opened the Spintex Road showroom, and this year — our thirtieth — we've done the thing the old sign never imagined: put the whole catalogue online, with prices in cedis on every piece, and remote ordering for the family abroad furnishing a home back in Ghana.
Daniel still inspects every piece that leaves the workshop. The sign has changed; the promise hasn't. Read the full story, or come and see the bench for yourself.
Shop the craft
See these woods and techniques in our handcrafted collections: living room furniture, dining room furniture, bedroom furniture, office & study furniture, outdoor furniture — all made to order in our Spintex Road workshop, or commission a custom piece.
