We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Cale & Melanie Dansbee a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Cale & Melanie, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Can you talk to us about a project that’s meant a lot to you?

When Melanie and I first moved to Colorado, we found a small but powerful non-profit organization that was hell-bent on spreading local art awareness around the area. We fell in love with their cause and soon met Isi Baquez and Jennifer Velasquez, the owners of Castle Rocks and Jewelry located in Castle Rock, CO.

Isi and Jennifer are ardent supporters of the arts and even let artists use their walls as gallery space to hang and sell their art. While we never hung any of our art in their jewelry store, we attended every art reception held there and got to know them a little better.

Along the way, we mentioned how modern and beautiful their jewelry store was and how we thought we could add extra punch by creating a new sign behind their main counter. We discussed ideas and presented some options, and they quickly fell in love with our ideas. Our final design was comprised of solid cherry wood pieces, decorated with laser cut and heat bent acrylic, along with crushed glass, copper patina, and LED back lighting.

The design process started with Cale creating an amazing 3D model and design for a new solid hardwood sign that would measure 4 feet tall and over 6 feet wide. His design incorporated their existing logo into what looked like the logo falling into water and the subsequent ripples that resulted. This became the final design, and Cale, Melanie, and their partner Joshua Peters set out to make this 3D model a reality.

This project is meaningful to us because it allows us to showcase all of our skills and abilities as mixed media artists and makers. This project included traditional woodworking, which is Joshua’s forte. It also included CNC milling, laser cutting, and an engineering brain to figure out how to hold it all together and mount it to a wall. This is where Cale brought his skills to bear. The assembly, finishing, and final touches were where Melanie took the spotlight. Her attention to detail and focus on quality are amazing and her work is why the sign gets so much attention.
Isi and Jennifer were in the store while we installed the new sign, and it was rewarding to watch their reaction as the final sign became visible. Seeing this new sign brought them to tears and likely bonded all of us together for life. That strong emotional connection to something we made that also had functional value is to us the very definition of art and success!

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

We call our workshop “Wonderland”. The inspiration we get from the challenge of doing something we’ve not done before and then watching customers’ reactions as we turn their ideas into reality, fuels us in our little shop of wonders!

We have been highly creative makers since we met and fell in love with each other back in the early 2000’s. Melanie’s background was in desktop publishing and scrapbooking and Cale’s background was in computer systems engineering and traditional artforms such as illustration, air brushing, and computer illustration. Cale grew up exploring woodworking with his dad Bobby and fell in love with making sawdust at an early age.

Ultimately, our business would be one that focuses on the computer-aided design and engineering of custom commission projects that includes woodworking. Our passion is to start with creative designs and take them through 3D design, modeling and simulation, prototyping, fabrication, delivery and installation.

Our mission is to produce one-of-a-kind pieces for our clients, as this is a high priority for them. Whether decorating their offices, businesses, or homes, they don’t seem to want to buy the same products everyone else is buying from retail stores.

Our core competencies allow us to design everything from wall art to furniture, as well as having the tools to fabricate wood, metal, and paint to produce unique pieces that fill our clients’ needs. We produce wall art pieces as small as 18” and as large enough to cover an entire 30’ wall from floor to ceiling with backlit mountains scenes created from layers of wood. We create custom fabricated metal and wood desks that include wireless phone charging and touch lighting.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

Since 2016, we have started and stopped more than a few times, including re-branding and re-focusing our business along the way. Perhaps we were in love with the idea of instant success and became frustrated when that didn’t happen. Our resilience came from our refusal to give up or give in. We kept discussing our business ideas, researching markets, watching trends, and asking ourselves, “What do we want Dansbee Designs to be?” While we still have not found the level of success that would satisfy us, we can say the adventure continues, which is one of our core themes.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

As it relates to our resilience, the lesson we had to unlearn was our belief that success could be instantaneous! We ultimately found that success comes from repetition, commitment to what drives us, and a connection between what we are passionate about and what our clients are passionate about. In college, we learned about marketing, niching-down, and finding an under-served market that we could dominate. While these may be valid business concepts, it takes more than that to find a sustainable business plan as an artist and creative maker of products.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://dansbeedesigns.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dansbeedesigns.com
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dansbeedesigns.com
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@dansbeedesigns

Image Credits

All photographs were taken by and are the property of Cale Dansbee.