Who we are

When I was a child in the 80’s there was no such thing as a DVR or YouTube. If you wanted to watch a TV show you had to be there when it was on. Got there 10 minutes late, oh well, better luck next week. Between baseball practice, video games and playing outside I would sometimes have the living room TV all to myself. And every so often, usually on a rainy Saturday, while I was scrolling through the channels I would get lucky and there would be this guy on the TV building stuff in his giant workshop. That guy was none other than Norm Abram. While I didn’t come from a family of woodworkers, my dad was a salesman and my mom was an office manager, Norm always had a way of drawing me into what ever he was making and made me want to do the same someday. Even though my dad was a ‘salesman’ he was always very mechanically inclined and taught my brother and I how to do basic carpentry. As the years passed I never really got into woodworking. Instead, I went into the technical / engineering world and then eventually into IT. I never lost the desire to do woodworking but I liked the ideal of mechanical perfection even more. Doing things like dovetails and having to use crazy jigs to make things line up perfect never seemed appealing. I even had fleeting thoughts of writing C# code to control something like a Rotozip or Dremel tool one day. Fast forward through marriage, a first home, 2 kids and all of the other craziness this life has to offer, I found something called a ‘3018-PRO’ on Amazon. Was it a production ready CNC mill that would catapult me into fame and fortune? No, not even close. Was it the best bang-for-buck learning tool to begin learning 3D CAD, CAM and work holding for me? I think so. I began by jumping into the deep end using Fusion 360 (having dabbled in AutoCAD back in the day) to do everything, boy was that a steep learning curve… I then took a step back and learned web-based Easel. Easel allowed me to grasp fundamentals much faster while the software took care of the ‘details’. Eventually I wanted to get into V-Carving and that’s where Easel draws the line and is no longer free. So, after testing out a few options I bit the bullet and bought Vectric V-Carve Pro (using money I had made in a super bowl pool). I started making little signs on my pint-sized CNC for friends and family and soon my boys started to see how cool it was. After a few months, my 3018 was really becoming a bottleneck for my aspirations so I designed and ordered all of the parts to make a 1500mm x 1500mm machine. During this time my mom had been diagnosed and passed away from cancer and I was really looking for some kind of answer to what everything was all for. I decided to move my family away from NJ and go to the land of the free in the Pocono Mountains of PA. We went from a 1000 sqft house on 0.10 acres to 3000+ sqft on 4+ acres. And somehow, with an insane amount luck (or someone watching over me), the property had a 30’x40’ pole barn I could turn into my dream workshop. I assembled my large format CNC and continued making cool gifts and projects for friends and family. Around this time, my younger son (Aiden) even had me making 3d carved signs for his teachers for teacher appreciation day for brownie points. Aiden even got into 3d printing to the point where he was taking orders from classmates and printing them things overnight. The principal made him stop when they saw him taking money from kids thinking he was selling drugs… My older son (Rich Jr.) was not the woodworking-type person, instead he liked playing with metal and working on engines. I got him a welder to practice with and he began making stands out of tube steel for our river table projects. Eventually he took a liking to finishing wood projects by sanding them to ridiculous grits (like 10,000), making even things like pine look like glass. While I was getting a lot of accolades on what I was creating, it was always just a hobby that I thought was a good way to teach the boys about work, pride and responsibility.

In January of 2024 we went to a wedding out in Arizona for my wife’s (Jen) cousin Patrick, and this is where our story really begins. Patrick knew I had my little woodworking side hustle and he basically ‘forced’ me to create an Etsy shop because it was ‘so easy’ and there was no excuse not to. By the end of the month I had my Etsy Shop up and running and started creating some inventory. Our first sale was Apr 15, 2024, a solid cherry carved clock with a 3d duck in the middle and epoxy numbers. The spring and summer were hectic with Aiden’s baseball and my real job, so I didn’t have much time to work on branding, just created more and more inventory and put them in the shop. As of now in December of 2024 we’re at 21 sales and about $800 in revenue. Between materials, shipping and paying my older son a fair wage for his work, I’m about breaking even. Factor in all of the equipment and, we won’t go there… :)

Anyway, that’s our story so far, we’ll see where things go in 2025!

Richard Eodice