How we got started…

Welcome everyone to my first official blog post. And with it being my first post, I thought it was only fitting to share a bit about how we got started, where we’re at, and maybe a bit about where we are going.

So back track about a decade, my wife and I had just moved to a new town, built a new house, and were just nicely settled in. We were still fairly newly married, and a lot of our furniture was second hand, or passed down from family, including our dining table. Somewhere or other Kandace discovered live edge tables. This was still before live edge had become really popular, and slabs were quite hard to find, especially locally! With some simple internet searching, it was quickly obvious that these tables were out of our price range. And then I had to open my mouth and say “I could build that”. Well a short time later we had sourced some live edge poplar slabs… in Toronto… Fortunately for us, my sister lives in Toronto, and they were coming home for a holiday, AND they were bringing a trailer! perfect timing. With a bit of help and over sight from my Dad (a retired contractor and very skilled hobby woodworker), we managed to turn some pretty plain looking wood into a very beautiful table!

Now you’re probably thinking, “don’t they make clocks?” Well yes, we do mostly make clocks, which brings us to the second part of this story. Fast forward a few years, Kandace has a side business with a friend sewing baby clothes, and they went to every local craft show they could as a vendor. Another vendor that was often at the same craft shows sold these huge clocks that Kandace fell in love with. She showed them to me, and was trying to convince me that we needed one. Once again I had to open my mouth with “I could build that.” So I found some barnboard from an old fallen down building on our property, and made her a clock. Now from there, we had a lot of family and friends who would comment on our clock when they would come visit. So we started making a few, mostly for gifts. Then people started seeing the ones we gifted, and started asking where they could get one. So things have rather organically grown from there.

As for where we are going, we can give a few clues. We have severely out-grown the shop I am currently working out of (20’ x 20’), so currently we are working on building a bigger shop (You can expect a blog post on the shop build in the near future). We are looking to add more products to our store, specifically live edge. But that is all I’m going to say about that for now.

If you have made it this far, thank you for taking the time to support our small business! We look forward to working with a lot of you in the future, and are humbled that you want a piece of Little River Design to be part of your home.

-Mark