The North Bay is home to artisans and custom manufacturers, many of whom are thriving in small-scale production while satisfying their own creativity.
With its reputation for world-class wine, luxurious hospitality, high-end real estate and gourmet local foods, it may be surprising to discover that the North Bay is also home to artisans and custom manufacturers, many of whom have adapted to the times and are thriving in small-scale production while satisfying their own creativity. NorthBay biz checks in with a few of these creators to find out what they’re doing, for whom…and how they’re managing to stay in business.
A Napa Valley fit
Say you want a unique way to let people know you’re uncorking unusually great wine in your establishment, and you’d like to put a 10-foot-tall corkscrew sculpture in front of your tasting room to attract attention. Where to get one? Go to Barrel Busters in Napa, where, for the last three years, John Ross and son-in-law/partner Eric Klein have been making a line of Napa Valley theme-based items for homes, businesses and events—out of used wine barrels. It may seem a quirky business concept at first, but given their associations in the valley, the ecological nature of the enterprise and the charismatic association with the wine industry, it seems to be a perfect Napa Valley fit. With little or no marketing, they’re going strong.
Ross neither has nor wants a website (he doesn’t want his life driven by too many orders), but he lends his entrepreneurial expertise at Uncorked in Napa’s Oxbow Public Market, a state-of-the-art tasting salon featuring Ahnfeldt Carducci wines, where you’ll find The Corkscrew out in front (he also made one for Joseph Phelps Vineyards). “I just refurbished it,” says Ross of the one at Oxbow. “I had a natural wood handle before, but it didn’t ‘pop.’ People would come in and I’d ask them, ‘Did you see my corkscrew out in front?’ and they’d say, ‘No!’ So I painted the handle red. Now they see it!”
The furniture inside the tasting room is all made by Barrel Busters and, Ross says, people sometimes want to take the wine-tasting experience home, including the tables and chairs. “I had some people in recently,” he says, “and they were sitting at the table on two little stools. They patted the table and stools and said they really liked them, so I said, ‘I’ll sell them to you!’” The couple finished their wine, then purchased the furniture and carried it out the door. (And yes, they bought wine, too).
“It’s a perfect scenario for us,” says Ross. “The items really add a lot of accent to the tasting room, and we don’t have to do any advertising.” As for the range of product, he’s flexible. “I can do custom things. If somebody draws me a design of what they want, we can usually do it.”
The studio out back
Ross and Klein build out of a 28-by-28-foot room in the back of Five Star Productions, the event design and planning company owned by Ross’ wife, Mary, who’s a regular client. He’s made nine-foot-tall dividing walls out of barrel staves, “weaving” the alternating convex and concave shapes on cables and hanging them from the ceiling on poles. “She’ll use them in jobs to hide something or make an accent,” he says. She can make use of his whole catalog of items including a Napa Valley version of Adirondack chairs, coffee tables, stools, ottomans, log holders, barrel ring walls, Lazy Susans, cocktail tables, candelabras, wine chillers, doggie beds and, of course, giant corkscrews.
Ross says he got the idea for the business about three years ago, when he began noticing wine barrel furniture out in the marketplace and decided to make his own, but with a more authentic feel. “I don’t stain them, and I don’t sand all the red wine off on the inside. I don’t try to make it look like it’s brand new.” He grins. “I’ll sand them to a degree and then put a clear seal over it—and it looks a lot better.”
There’s a rustic beauty to the pieces, with the curvature of form and seasoned wood. Ross says that, while most of the wine barrel furniture on the market looks like new furniture, his looks like its been involved in making wine. In fact, he purposefully leaves the residual sugar inside the stave, which leaves a crusty, pinkish appearance and a distinct aroma of wine, so it shows authenticity. “It’s very Napa Valley!” he says. Except for the prices, which are more reasonable: “We make a very good product that’s very reasonably priced.”
And that’s fine, because he’s not in it for the money. “It’s a nice thing to do. Have fun. Listen to the sander going, the drill going. Once you get one done, you think, ‘Wow, I made that.’ It’s a good feeling.”
Action figures and Peanuts art
Over in Sebastopol, at Anaglyph Sculpture Inc., Scott Hensey, toy sculptor and prototype designer, gets his satisfaction by hand sculpting, in the craft mode, models for toys, figurines or iconic objects. His creations aren’t for the retail market, but rather are commissioned by companies (for sale or distribution), approved by license holders, and then, usually, manufactured in large quantities for the consumer market. While recent advances in computer technology and changes in the economy have caused him to reduce the scope of his formerly large operation, it’s apparent, watching him with his creations, that the original satisfaction remains.
“Essentially, what I do is channel my clients,” says Hensey. “I read their minds and then I sculpt the item they’ve requested. When I’m done, I send a picture or model to the licenser or the property owner—whether it’s Disney or Creative Associates [the Charles Schulz people]—and they critique it.”
Holding a model of a four-inch-tall Mickey Mouse as an example of his work, he explains, “They’ll look at the way he’s standing, how big his ears are, whether the buttons and gloves are right and generally whether he’s ‘character correct.’” Once the licenser approves the model, Hensey will send a picture to the client (the company that will be selling or distributing the item) for comment; he then works back and forth between licenser and client until everyone agrees. “So it’s like having many bosses,” he says, with a full-bearded, Santa-like smile.
Change and competition
Originally, he says, he did nothing but toys. That was his love. One of his first major lines was Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. “Playmates Toys bought the license to produce toys based on this underground, two-dimensional comic, and hired me and a couple of other guys to produce prototypes for the action figures,” he says. “We made the sculptures, then molded and painted them and sent the toy company painted samples for trade shows and commercials. Back then, the licensers were just happy somebody was buying the stuff.”
Around that time, Hensey also got a contract producing the toys that went into McDonald’s Happy Meals, which were mostly characters from Disney movies. With his business suddenly thriving, he expanded his studio. Then times changed. Now, he says, most kids—his ultimate clients—don’t play with toys anymore; they play with video games. “So now, toy companies don’t make toys,” he says, “and the Happy Meals toys are all produced in Hong Kong.”
What’s left is the giftware—the Peanuts figures and the Mickey Mouses. “So I’m happy to do that, it just isn’t as lucrative,” he says. “I can’t keep a big giant staff around.”
Another line that’s dropped away is jewelry. “There was a time when we were sculpting jewelry prototypes,” he says, “but that kind of stuff doesn’t come in as often now, because it’s so easy to scan something and resize it in the computer.” He laughs at the suggestion that 3-D printing may loom as competition. “It’s no competition at all. It’s just stomped me!” He seems at peace with this development and says there’s no point fighting against technology: It’s here. And—another smile—actually, video games can be fun.
But, he adds, there’s an inevitable trade-off. While it’s cheaper and faster to produce a digital image on the computer screen and then send that file to Hong Kong to be manufactured (without the middle step of actually producing a sculpture), there’s an inevitable loss in quality—a certain liveliness you get from a form produced free-hand.
Adding to the tension is the fact that, for economic reasons, certain “safety steps” along the way have been eliminated. “It used to be that I’d make a silicone mold of the piece and then make plastic urethane resin copies to send off to the client. But as budgets have been shaved down, [clients] don’t want to pay me to make the molds. So I put the original sculpture in a box and ship it off. That’s the way the giftware industry wants to work now.” Although he says, in 15 years, FedEx has never lost anything, “It still leaves me a little nervous, you know?”
Hensey says his clients now tend to be small- or medium-sized companies with the occasional independent company or startup that wants a model for a presentation. The big companies may occasionally still hire him to do conceptual things, such as making a 3D rendering that he’d then scan for the company’s engineers to manipulate.
But a really small company might want a prototype on a limited budget. So he needs to figure out how—or if—he can create a sculptural rendering within the client’s budget. Midsized companies are still hiring him to do prototype work, he says, because they’re large enough to be actually producing something, but they can’t afford a full-scale digital workforce.
On an ever-changing playing field, what’s the ultimate satisfaction? “Just the sculpture,” he says. “Starting from scratch and finishing with something that has life. And the licensers still like working with me.”
Satisfaction cast in stone
At D&S Awards and Engraving, LLC in Santa Rosa, clients are unified by one overarching desire: to honor, recognize or remember someone or something of value. It may be an award for an achievement, life, dedicated career, fabulous wine, wedding or the launch of a new business, but the common denominators are the uniqueness of the ideas customers bring to owners Dennis and Sherryl Wilkinson and the creativity the Wilkinsons and their staff use to design an object that gives the presenter as much pride as the person receiving the award.
“We’re full service,” says Dennis Wilkinson. “We supply the items, engrave them and maintain quality throughout the process.” D&S can fabricate in glass (including wine bottles), crystal, stainless steel, stone, brass, ceramic, fabric and many other substrates you wouldn’t expect. The company has worked on projects as small as a single plaque and as large as donor walls and jobs with thousands of pieces. For custom marble or granite work, he’ll send the client to the marble company, which will cut the stone to size, and then Dennis will do the engraving and coloring.
This being Wine Country, a big part of the business is etching wine bottles. “We do a lot of single wine bottles for weddings, anniversaries and auctions,” says Dennis. “Sherryl and I do it all here. We do thousands and thousands of bottles annually. Some jobs, we will do 400 to 500 per week and other jobs may be for six to 12 bottles.”
The Wilkinsons have been creating trophies and objects for recognition since 1991, when Dennis was preparing to leave his career as a diesel mechanic. Over the years, the business has grown to the point where it’s become an industry leader that uses cutting-edge technology, with the latest laser engravers and sublimation printers, combined with their own creativity. While that may sound like big business, “We’re a mom-and-pop store,” says Wilkinson, “and we try to keep it that way.”
Dennis is the only CRM (Certified Recognition Master) in this part of the state (#32 in the world) and Sherryl is a CRS (Certified Recognition Specialist). In 1993, D&S Awards was named Retailer of the Year by the Awards and Recognition Association.
The economics of ever-fluctuating custom work can be tricky, but success boils down to knowing your business. “I recently taught a seminar in Las Vegas, called ‘How Much the Key Costs,’ on how much it costs to own the key to your business’ front door,” says Wilkinson. “So I know how much I need to make per day, per hour, to stay in business and go where I want to go. By having this information, we can then calculate the costs and work a formula to figure out how much to charge to stay in business.”
He’s not concerned about competition. “They do what they do and I know what I need to charge to get to where I want to go. I don’t try to match their price, because they may or may not have a formula like mine to help with costing. From the folks that I have spoken with while teaching, the majority of the stores in my industry just have a blanket mark-up calculation without knowing all the real details of the cost-sell ratio needed to survive and thrive.Sometimes my prices are less; sometimes they’re more, but they’re always fair.”
New digital technologies haven’t impinged upon his work, and new laser techniques have actually helped. “We’ve converted everything we can to run on laser, to get a better job, faster,” he says, “but still, not every single job is faster. It just depends on what you’re doing. No one rule fits every project.” For him, that variation seems to be the norm and also one of the pleasures of his custom work.
Another pleasure is the occasional truly unique request from a high-profile client. “Right now, I’m in the process of creating a bottle for a barbecue I’m taking to a Florida event in which Emeril Lagasse, with one of his chefs, will participate in a pig cook-off with a select group of celebrities and winemakers. I mounted a little barbecue figurine on a wine bottle that’s covered with etchings, and the figurine is all in color, and I drilled some passages in it and hollowed it out so I can put in some dry ice with a little bit of water, and it actually smokes out the smokestack for a few minutes. It’s a live auction item.”
Creativity, satisfaction and success
Like both Ross and Hensey, Wilkinson depends on little or no marketing, other than word of mouth and the recognition gained from satisfied customers and also dedicated community service (including many years coaching youth sports teams). “We work hard and are proud to be part of the Santa Rosa and Sonoma County community,” he says.
As a custom business, catering to the preferences of individual and corporate clients, money is a priority as far as “owning the key to your door” but it’s not the highest priority for him, nor does it seem for Hensey or Ross. For these custom purveyors of widely different products and processes, the commonality seems to be the sheer love of doing it. The satisfaction of saying, at the end of the day, “I made that.” And the customer gets the fun of a kind of creative partnership or association with an object that’s personally made.
