Two years ago I opened my own workshop in Amsterdam. I didn't come from a big furniture company, and I wasn't some veteran cabinet maker with twenty years of experience behind me. I was learning as I went, and every project taught me something new.
Pretty early on I decided I wanted my workshop to be technology driven. That's just who I am — I like tools, I like systems, I like finding better ways of doing things. So naturally, I started looking for furniture software.
I started with SketchUp, then moved to Shapr3D. Both worked, in their own way, but neither really felt built for cabinet making. So I went looking for something more specialised and found TrunCAD. The promise sounded great: easy to learn, cabinet focused. A week later I gave up. Something just wasn't clicking.
Next came Polyboard, and at first I actually liked it. Simple cabinets were quick, boxes were easy. But then real customer projects started coming in — sloped ceilings, odd spaces, custom details — and suddenly I was spending more time fighting settings than designing furniture. Support tickets became normal. Training videos became normal. Feeling frustrated became normal. Eventually I went back to Shapr3D just to get work out the door.
Fast forward a year. I was seriously considering my first CNC machine, and the software question came back with it. Friends suggested AutoCAD, Fusion, Vectorworks. Then I discovered Mozaik, and at first I hated it. I came from a visual world — I built furniture block by block — and now I was staring at endless parameters, trying to understand how changing numbers would affect the thing I could already see on my screen.
Eventually things started making sense. Three weeks in, I could do some projects. Six weeks in, I could do most projects. Four months in, I finally felt productive. And that's when it hit me: four months. For a two-person workshop. That can't be normal.
Later I hired a trainer on Fiverr, and when I told him how long I'd been learning, he said most people take six months to a year before they become comfortable. That conversation stuck with me. The problem wasn't missing features — the software could do amazing things. The problem was how much effort it took to get there.
That's when the idea for MC Studio was born. I started asking myself a simple question: what if furniture software felt like an extension of the workshop, instead of a separate world you had to learn?