In 2013, I was in my last year of college and I wanted to make a bar, but living with 3 roommates and their different opinions, this turned it into a bar cart. Maybe this was also motivated by Mad Men and Parks and Rec both being on the air, a cross between the mid-century bar cart aesthetic with the everything must be handmade views of Ron Swanson. With no concept of production (besides for marathons of how it’s made when I was young) or that product design was an actual career, I sketched and very roughly made the first prototype in the dining room of that shared living situation. Friends liked the design and was pushed to post it on a site called Etsy that was just starting to take off.

The first one sold to a customer in California, and when I went to ship it I found out it would cost around $200 to send fully assembled, more than I'd sold the cart for in the first place. So I rushed to rework the design to pack flat, and shipping dropped to $50, a quarter of the original cost. Designing furniture to flat-pack and ship efficiently put me in a position of being cost competitively with large furniture stores, so I made that the center of my business model moving forward. One order led to many since early on Etsy, I was the only handmade bar cart offering. I quickly took over my parents garage and created a micro factory, before I moved out and set up my own woodworking studio space.

I ran it for six years, and the designs grew up over that time, but not as much as I liked. I realized that production, running a shop and a business were taking all of my time. I was hardly spending any time solving the engineering problems I fell in love with in the first place. I decided to stop the furniture operations in 2019 and move across country to Portland, OR. It was a wild ride, I sold over 800 pieces around the country, a few around the world, and the shop was featured on Etsy's homepage and briefly in Architectural Digest. This experience laid the foundation for my understanding of manufacturing, product design and development, and I am so grateful for stumbling into this fulfilling career path.