The drawers are found in closets and mudrooms, home offices, and laundry rooms in the Midwest and across the U.S. Even living areas and garages utilize Amish-made dovetail drawers.

For instance, Meridian Closets in Indianapolis designs, manufactures, and installs custom closets, cabinetry, and Murphy beds. The high-end closets company partners and shares manufacturing with the Better Way Murphy Bed Company, which president Lauren Schwartz says is the country's largest supplier of real wood beds. 

Both companies use dovetail drawers for their systems that are installed throughout the house. “We run the whole gamut of projects,” she said. “We produce nice, fancy closets with all the bells and whistles. Our options are ‘endless’ here for closets and the storage components that go with it. And they're all totally customized to fit your space and fit your storage needs. They can be done in a lot of pretty cool finishes and all our drawer boxes are dovetailed.”

Dovetail drawers are considered a sign of quality and solid construction because of their interlocking design, which makes them strong, durable, and visually appealing. Perfect for closets that need to have a touch of elegance and sophistication while also providing high-tensile strength, achieved by interlocking "pins" and "tails" of a dovetail joint, which makes the drawer resistant to being pulled apart.” With proper care and maintenance, dovetail drawers can last for many years. 

Outsourcing
Meridian and scores of other closet design and manufacturers outsource their drawer box production. For them, each drawer is built in the heart of Indiana’s Amish country, “where we deliver quality, affordability, reliability, and beauty you’ll be proud to offer your customers,” said Jim Troyer owner of Amish Country Woodworx distributor of the drawers.

David Miller, owner of Superior Dovetail Drawers, a specialized drawer manufacturer in Topeka, Indiana, said “at our shop we specialize in dovetail drawer boxes. We can build custom drawer boxes, in any drawer sizes you need, or we build pre-finished drawer boxes for fast turnaround.”

Whether your project is a small job or a large commercial project, Troyer and Miller said they can take on the job. 
The dovetail drawers are built using half-blind dovetail joints, which are dovetail joints that hide the joint from the front of the drawer by embedding the tails in the ends of the board.

The company builds and ships dovetail drawers to closet manufacturers as well as cabinetry and other wood products manufacturers. Two product lines are offered, including the Express Series, and a Custom Selects line. 

The Express line has a five-day turnaround. It is a builder’s grade drawer crafted from ⅝” solid wood UV prefinished White Poplar stock that is already milled with a top profile and bottom dado. The “tails” on the drawer sides are unfinished.
The Custom Select line has a 10-day normal production lead time. Available in custom heights, widths, and depths, they are ⅝” solid wood drawers using selected raw wood milled to the correct specifications, and after careful assembly and hand sanding, they are sent to a nearby finish shop for waterborne, low VOC sealer and a clear satin finish.

Miller said for the custom line of drawers, the drawers are built to a client’s height, width, and depth specifications to the 1/16”. The company specializes in custom orders, offering flexible sizing and design options to fit cabinet or closet projects. Also available are file drawers, U-shaped drawers, inside corner drawers, spice rack pullouts, and various waste-basket pull-outs. 

The wastebasket pullouts are available with a single bin or a double bin that are pre-assembled with slides already mounted for easy assembly, said Troyer.

Production
In the open floor-plan manufacturing facility, there are multiple production, sanding, and assembly stations. 
For the Express series, three or four 40-foot containers are used annually. The boards come in 8-foot lengths and are four inches, six inches, eight inches, and ten inches high. The boards are cut to length on a chop saw and are dovetailed on a dovetailing machine. Many end-use customers have their logos burned into the UV-finished board. 

For Custom Select, customers have a lot of available choices in terms of dimensions and materials. “If they want ¼-inch birch, 1/5-inch birch if they want, 1/2-inch maple, ¼- inch maple, walnut, whatever they want that's what we try to keep in stock, said Miller. “We keep all the different sizes available at all times so that we can ship the products as quickly as possible. We have delivery trucks here every day to get the products out.”