Furniture designers

Yes, many of them do... I work with one company where there is an engineer there from that industry.. but I would suggest really getting on the ground floor to learn about the furniture construction techniques... this may take a while.. there are some great books available as well.. but getting hands on is the best. If you can reverse engineer objects from an image, this is a good start. understanding woodworking joinery would be another good expertise to learn... many furniture manufacturing is a part of many industries... wood, metal, upholstery, glass, stone..etc... so over lapping knowledge is good to know. You can also do freelance for Interior designers .. many of them do not like doing drafing or technical drawings ..so they contract this out.. creating blueprints for manufacturing is what I do for many designers, manufacturing, and others... you are creating the road map to get an object manufactured. here is my portfolio just for your review of work that I have done. https://www.behance.net/imadethat2

If you plan to create board furniture then best software choise is to use autodesk inventor and additional plug in called woodwork for inventor,

https://www.woodworkforinventor.com/

if you can create some 3d model for drawings this is only 30 percent needed information for production. Woodwork for inventor gives possibility to add additionals information for 3d surfaces. So you will get automaticaly material summary Bom in excel , how much edgeband, veneer, paint or laminated board you need. And also if you buy W4i plug in with CAM versioon then you can convert yours 3d part files to cnc machine files very easily. Most complicated tasks to start furniture design is to understand different furniture factory inside rules and technollogy and also understanding every single woodwork machine limits. Some company dont have press they buy only laminated board. For other company you need to know what is their maximum press dimension. It means that construction can be different for every factory.

Read the Neufert and learn standart of dimension

Good luck

You can actually create your own material library within the inventor itself including color, texture, etc .. It will require a lot of setting up the first time. I am also starting to enter into furniture design myself and maybe we can share the material data if you like. I am still in the process of collecting data for different type of wood properties and texture. Let me know if I can help.