The Experiment in Direct Marketing Continues

When I am a vendor at the Portland Saturday Market, wine festivals or street fairs, I hand out lots of cards and flyers to people who say they are interested in buying one of my wine racks or having a custom rack made for them. Very few of those people ever contact me. For a while there I didn’t know what to think. Maybe this is not the way to go about selling my products.

Possibly wine racks were something too large for purchase from a craft vendor, except that I have sold some of the largest wine racks I have ever produced to people who walked up, said, “Wow these are cool, I have been looking and have never seen anything like this!” Then bang, they whip out a couple hundred bucks cash and take them away.

I believed going into this,  setting up a vendors booth at markets was partly to get my products out in front of people and get some feedback about them. Secondly, I might take orders for custom work, or have folks look on-line here at other inventory that I couldn’t bring out to show.

Finally a couple that talked to me at the PSM, e-mailed me and set up an appointment to come to the shop to see what kinds of wine racks I had. They ended up buying one of the larger pieces that got great comments every time I showed it.

There was another piece of furniture in the shop that they liked too. It was the first in a series of tables that I made a few years ago as a design exercise. They bought this one also.

I called them “eighth note” tables because I wanted the legs to look like musical notation. Back in my previous life as a contractor, I worked on a new house doing finish carpentry. The flooring contractors installed pre-finished Brazilian Cherry flooring throughout that house and two others next door. They made a huge pile of off cuts and mistake cuts to haul to the dump. I ask if I could have it. They said it’s all trash and they gave me some opened boxes of material that they couldn’t return also.

I wrapped the entryway columns with specially milled Mahogany

One of the most difficult jobs I ever tackled

You can see a stairway inside the front door. It was metal framed and I fabricated, installed 2″ thick Brazilian Cherry stair treads.

You can see the flooring material, and I salvaged left over material that was used to edge around the stair wells.

I planed the finish off the flooring and laminated pieces together for the legs and stretchers, then I took short off cuts left from the thick stair treads to glue up a laminated butcher block top with the thick edging material as the border.

The shelf was carved with a router jig out of a big piece I had in my lumber stash for many years. I think I got it at an auction.

This table was pretty tall at about 38″.

The second variation was a little shorter at 30″. When all was said and done I think I had something like 90 hours into this one table. Some exercise!

And this was a coffee table, more or less square at about 26″ in height. Once I did one the others were faster… but that is not saying much.

Thank you to Kristy and Deb for supporting my efforts. I’m glad they went to a good home!

Clear vertical Grained Fir and California Redwood with a marble tile top.

Portland Seafood & Wine Festival

seafoodandwine

The experiment in direct marketing continues this weekend. If you are in town come see me at booth #1115. I think it is a corner booth.

I have heard radio spots all week and just saw a TV commercial. I think it is twelve bucks to get in and you get a hundred bucks worth of coupons for local restaurants, etc.  Hey, the first three hundred visitors get and commemorative wine glass!

There are supposed to be fifty wineries in attendance. I believe that the application process for the wine vendors closed within a couple of weeks of last years festival. The organizers had 8500 visitors last years and expect a good turn out this year too. We will see!

I have been busy in the shop. I have a number of new pieces to take to this show. I have a bunch of stuff that got cut out but is in pieces on the bench. I had some problems with tools and a machine breaking, so I got a little behind. Still, I have more stuff to show that I have space.

Oregon Black Walnut... my favorite!

I try to get a bunch of projects glued up and sanded, so when I set up to spray finishes, I am more efficient with the time it takes for the process to apply all the coats. I hope to set up today and take photographs of my current inventory as I load it up for the show.

Number one… KTW#0104

In the winter of 1977 a nasty storm ripped a big limb from an old Black Walnut tree in my back yard in San Mateo, California. I chained sawed it into three foot long logs and sliced them length wise with a razor sharp Fanno pruning saw. My hands were left covered in blisters. I moved these pieces of Walnut around for years not sure what to do with them.

About 1994 I was doing a remodel in Palo Alto. One morning I came to the job to find a tree service cutting down a gigantic tree in the front yard. I ask what it was and the contractor said it was the biggest Apple tree he had ever seen. They cut it into fire wood, but I grabbed a couple 10″ thick branches about three feet long.

On one trip, when moving my shop to Portland, I towed a trailer with a stash of  wood I had been air drying for many years. My wife looked at it and and said, “I know you are wood collector but you moved firewood?”

Most all the furniture in our house, I have built over time out of left overs from jobs or scavenged out of debris boxes. I can’t really afford to keep my own work anymore, but sometimes, I have so much time and energy into a piece that money can’t compensate me. This is my “Rotten Apple” table. It was the first project I built in my new shop out of the Spalted Apple logs and what was left of my Black Walnut stash. When I was done, there were barely enough scrap to kindling a fire. It is only 29″ tall because that is how long the log was.

It is finished with a traditional oil and wax. Over time, like most fruit woods, the color has become rich and dark. This piece was the inspiration for my  first series of  Wine Console Tables.

I love slicing up logs to reveal the treasures inside. I get pleasure in watching router or shaper bits peel away the grain. I could do this for the rest of my life and never get bored.