Is Chic Artique Woke?

Company Overview

Chic Artique is a family-owned home-decor, furniture, and gift boutique located at 132 South Main Street in Goodlettsville, Tennessee, just north of Nashville. The business began in 2014 when Jenna Rummel and her husband Jonathan started building furniture in their garage and selling pieces from a small booth in Gallatin, in part to teach their son the value of building something real and bringing it to market. From a humble 10-by-15 booth, the family grew into a 350-square-foot storefront and then into a sprawling shopping experience of roughly 6,000 to 7,000 square feet of carefully curated merchandise.

Today Chic Artique sells handcrafted headboards and porch swings (its best sellers), farm-style tables, benches, shelves, plate racks, bedding, lighting, rugs, draperies, architectural salvage, florals, candles, and a ladies' clothing boutique. The Rummels also run a sister store, Good Place Mercantile, with more than thirty local vendor booths. The shop has earned genuine recognition, having been featured on Fox & Friends, named to Southern Living's Top 10 Boutiques in Tennessee, and spotlighted in Nashville Interiors, and it draws shoppers from across the country. This is a true family enterprise, with the husband running the wood shop and finances and their high-school-aged daughter often working the register and greeting customers.

ESG & Sustainability

There is no public evidence that Chic Artique maintains an ESG program, issues a sustainability report, sets emissions targets, or aligns itself with the corporate social-scoring frameworks now common among large retailers. As a privately held family business, it answers to its customers and its own values, not to activist investors or ratings agencies.

What it does offer, almost incidentally, is the kind of substance that ESG marketing only gestures at: durable, handcrafted wood furniture built to last, plus a marketplace of local vendors at its sister store. Buying a solid, made-to-last headboard from a local craftsman is genuine stewardship, far more so than a disposable product wrapped in green-sounding slogans. The focus here is craftsmanship and longevity, not corporate virtue branding.

DEI Programs

We found no public evidence that Chic Artique operates a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion department, enforces hiring quotas, or requires ideological training. This is a family-run shop where the owners, their children, and a small staff serve every customer who walks in the door with the same Southern hospitality.

The business hires the way small businesses have always hired, based on work ethic, skill, and trust, often within the family itself. There is no DEI bureaucracy layered on top of a furniture store, and there does not need to be. Customers are welcomed warmly and treated as guests, which is exactly the experience the Rummels say they set out to create.

LGBTQ+ Advocacy

Chic Artique has no Human Rights Campaign Corporate Equality Index score, which is entirely expected and appropriate for a small family boutique. There is no public record of Pride-month campaigns, rainbow rebranding, corporate Pride sponsorships, or activist partnerships of any kind.

Instead, the brand leans into a warm, traditional, family-and-home aesthetic, the farmhouse style, the handcrafted furniture, the seasonal and gift collections that make a house feel like a home. Its public identity is centered on family, craftsmanship, and Southern charm rather than on social-cause activism. Shoppers can browse and buy without any political messaging attached to the experience.

Political Activity

We located no public evidence of corporate political contributions, PAC activity, candidate or ballot-measure endorsements, or participation in corporate pledges such as CEO Action for Diversity & Inclusion. The Rummels appear to keep their business squarely in the business of selling beautiful, well-made goods.

That restraint is exactly what many shoppers want. There is no risk that a purchase here is quietly underwriting a partisan cause. The story Chic Artique tells about itself is one of entrepreneurship, family, and hard work, the classic American small-business narrative, not a political platform.

Consumer Impact

For values-based and conservative-minded shoppers, Chic Artique is a near-perfect example of a business worth supporting. It is family-owned, locally rooted, and built on craftsmanship and hospitality, with no ESG apparatus, no DEI bureaucracy, no Pride-marketing machine, no HRC score, and no political donations on record. That earns it a 3/100 woke score and a "not woke" rating.

Spending money at Chic Artique means supporting a multi-generation family enterprise that started in a garage and grew through grit and skill, the kind of story that deserves to be rewarded in the marketplace. You get well-made furniture and thoughtfully curated decor, and you get the peace of mind that your dollars are going toward a hardworking American family rather than toward activist causes. In an era when so many retailers feel compelled to broadcast their politics, a shop that simply makes beautiful things and treats customers like neighbors is exactly the kind of business conservative consumers should seek out and celebrate.