Ready Set Go!
Our Why
As a professional maker, it's natural to reach a point where serving local clients is no longer enough. Don't get me wrong. It is fun to help folks bring their ideas to fruition. It is great to be surrounded with creative opportunity and step back and admire the beautiful things you make. But when you are honest with yourself, being a maker is not a great way to make a living. The desire to expand your reach and be more entrepreneurial is common in this industry. I am finding making that leap challenging for so many reasons. But at this point in my life none of those reasons are as important as the reasons for doing it. Namely, family. I want to demonstrate to my kiddo that you can have passion and make a living. I want my wife to come home to a spouse who has the bandwidth to make coming home from work energizing and dare I say "fun".
Identity = direction
Finding your identity is probably an ongoing thing for everyone, and it certainly is for me. I think it particularly is for folks who try and make a living off the things they make. I started this journey flipping houses around Y2K. By 2014 I was making Japanese style furniture and ready to dive in full time. For 2 years I was occupied with by the rush of it of making functional art. But in the end I had barely earned enough money to pay for all the tools I had purchased to do the work. I reverted course and headed back to the rat race. By 2019 The itch to get back in the shop was too strong to ignore and when Covid hit, I saw it as the perfect opportunity to pick up the tools and see if I could make a real go of it. But I was going to be smart this time. I would stay where the money was; the housing market. By 2025 I was one of the many successful but burnt and crusty general contractors. My friendship and professional connection with Dayton Young was probably the best thing to come out of it. And though we had built some beautiful things and worked for some wonderful people along the wayDayton and I were both ready to get out of the slog, stress and monotony of working on other peoples homes. My wife's job change afforded me another chance to re-evaluate my path and try to find a balance between inspiration and business success. Dayton and I made a right hand turn away from financial success over everything and towards making things that made us feel good on the daily basis. go into business together. We had a vision of honing in on making everyday products something everyday people could feel good using.
Customer = Collaborator
In the home building world we worked for all sorts of customers. Across the many many people we have worked for there have been more than a few that have stood out for an appreciation of design, quality, and personalization. Those were the folks that were fun to work for, appreciative of our attention and thoughtfulness, and excited to see what we did each and every day. The other thing we noticed in the home building world was that cost was the major obstacle most people had to getting those characteristics. With this foray both into everyday items and out onto the inter webs we hope to connect to more people who share these values. We have a secret ambition to at some point allow those folks to come us with their design ideas to create new products (but that is for another post). For now that looks like replacing a cheap imported cutting boards or coasters with one that combines style, material, and function in a way we haven't seen before. We hope to bring that same approach to discovering many more kitchen, office, and even bathroom items with our customers.
Finding Connections
At this point everything Dayton and I know about online marketing wouldn't fill a thimble. So our "plan" is to get out there, as much as possible, with what we want to do and see what sticks. Right now for us it is getting out of our comfort zone and seeing if people connect with our designs, and our approach. He hope to provide good insights into our process and our products in the hopes that people will connect with what we do and why we are doing it. And it is our hope that that will be enough to be the backbone of our business.
