We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful J. Drew Silvers. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with J. Drew below.

Hi J. Drew, thanks for joining us today. What was the most important lesson/experience you had in a job that has helped you in your creative career?

When I was a child, someone once told me that if you spend your whole day talking, you won’t learn anything and will only know what you already know. However, if you spend your whole day listening and paying attention to what’s around you, you’ll then know what you already know, and what the other people in the room know. I had been working continually since I was fifteen years old (retail, real estate internship, restaurants) but got my first full-time job when was twenty-one. The best thing I took away from that experience of five years was just paying attention to the higher-ups and what was going on with them and what was happening in the regular meetings where I wasn’t included. Aside from one mentor in that environment who I’m still close to, the majority of what I was learning was what not to do.

In those five years I saw a lot of people in higher positions taking risks that weren’t necessary for the better of the company. I saw a lot of senseless spending and allocations of those funds for what seemed like ego-driven or vanity driven reasons. I saw the people at the top chew each other up behind their backs, while giving a facade of everything being just fine outwardly. There were many instances of those same people making moves to give a false sense of security and caring about the employees below them, when what they were really pushing for was self preservation.

I think the majority of those issues were based around what those in higher positions wanted the public to see. Meaning that they wanted to present themselves as being a bigger entity, a bigger business, a key player in the industry, when the reality was that things behind the surface were a mess. This eventually culminated in a whole slew of investors losing money, lower management positions like mine being terminated, and eventually the company fell in on itself. Nothing is ever simple in business, but I knew from that point forward that if I were to ever have the opportunity to start a business of my own, I would focus on the key factors: My own customers 100%, the relevance of my business within my niche, and my mental/physical health during that process so I’m always as focused and clear minded as possible. I wanted to put the people I served first and not care about the frivolous and meaningless perceptions of anyone outside of that border.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers

I have the sort of story where everything comes full-circle. Where you end up back where you started in some ways. After high school I took a gap year and worked with my dad doing carpentry, which lasted through a few of my early years of college as well. My dad was a warehouse manager for the first half of my childhood, but built pretty intricate furniture on the weekends in a small shop beside our house. As a kid I didn’t care much about it because I didn’t like being covered in sawdust, nor the noise of the tools. When I was working with him in college I wasn’t much for it, but it was a way to make a paycheck while I was in school.

Eventually he didn’t have enough work for me, so I ended up taking a job as a server at a restaurant, then after that I landed in a lower level management position at a private golf club during my last two years of school, which carried over three more years. Myself and others on the same level of employment were laid off from that company in 2011. I spent the next year deep in a horrible depression that was propped up by the alcohol addiction that had been slowly taking over my life outside of work. The job market in those days was really hard as I was looking to start completely over and I kept getting rejected for being overqualified for entry level positions.

My dad’s business was doing better at that time, so I ended up working with him again part time. It wasn’t until then that I started getting more into carpentry and trying to absorb and learn all that I could. I learned the things in those day from him that set my own woodworking interests in motion. My dad didn’t work weekends, so I would go to the shop on Saturdays and Sundays, working on my own projects, building furniture in my own design language that had been developing. This led to me opening an online storefront, and quickly realizing that I needed to make designs that were easier to ship.

I had been a rock collector most of my life at that point (I still have my first amethyst chunk from when I was seven years old) having a few years here and there of more or less interest in the hobby. At the urging of a friend, I started making dedicated shelving for rock and crystal collectors in mid-2013. Making smaller geometric shapes that were easier to ship anywhere made my creative brain explode with ideas. I started with basic shapes and my work became more and more detailed over time, more and more centered around natural themes, astronomy, and astrology. I had been living well below the poverty line for about two year at that point. My savings was completely depleted, I had no financial stability, but things started moving at a consistent pace in 2014. I was still working part time with my dad while also working on my own designs every moment he wasn’t in the shop. I kept this pace that entire year and into early 2015.

Even though there was a slight sense of stability at that point, I spent nothing on myself in that era. I saved and reinvested every cent I could back into growing my business and acquiring the tools to help grow. In the spring of 2015 I was able to break off from my dad’s part time employment (which he supported), but still didn’t have a shop of my own, so I would work overnight in his shop. I would literally take a picture of his shop after he left for the day, move his projects out of the way, work on my own designs overnight, and then reference the picture I had taken to move all of his stuff back into place. By the summer of that year I was able to make a small workshop in my basement by using some of my dad’s old power tools and acquiring the rest of what I needed at pawn shops and through craigslist. It was enough for me to be able to produce my crystal shelving designs completely at home. Later that summer I was about to buy a $2000 pickup truck, so I didn’t have to depend on my dad’s trips to the lumber yard anymore. My business continued to grow, my designs were getting more intricate, and I was finally able to do the simple things I had been putting off for a few years. I bought a few pairs of new jeans, some shirts, a pair of shoes, stocked up my kitchen cabinets a bit better, and finally felt some semblance of stability.

My focus that entire time was about listening to my customers. I was fully capable of making very intricate, very bespoke, and very detailed designs. I scattered a few of those designs in, people love them and reacted well to them, but over time I figured out that while my customer base was excited about these pieces, they weren’t buying them. About half of my designs were being purchased by my customers, but the other half – those I had to charge a premium for due to the effort they required to make – were sitting in the shop and not selling. I was selling out of my lower priced designs regularly. Anything that was between $30-50 was regularly out of stock outside of the scheduled days I would restock my shop, while the more expensive pieces were sitting. That was hurting me because potential customers would find me through social media, come to my online store, and only see higher priced items available. They would then lose interest because they thought I was too expensive. I quickly learned that my customers lived in a price range. They were indirectly telling me this, and from lessons learned in the past, I decided to listen.

I took a plunge, took out a loan and bought a laser engraver with no idea how they worked or what I would even do with one. But I knew I wanted to make more intricate, detailed pieces with special engravings and cuts that I could still price within a bracket where my customers wanted to be. I hadn’t ever worked with CAD software before. I had no idea what I was doing, but with a year of struggle and headaches of learning how all of it worked on my own, I was able to make more detailed pieces, expend my design language, and still keep my pricing in line with where my customer base felt most comfortable. And I was able to do it while sourcing all of my wood and finishing materials completely domestically. All of my products are made with wood that was grown and processed in the United States.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

The most rewarding aspect of being an artist and creative is pretty simple. It’s knowing that people hold my work and designs in such high regard that they want to give them to family and friends. I can’t think of a high compliment. They trust my work and quality so much that they want someone special in their life to own something that came from my brain, was made with my hands, and was shipped to them by me. That’s an incredible feeling to know that someone is opening a gift that I made for their birthday, holiday, or other special occasion, and feeling some happiness about it. I can’t think about it too much or I get more emotion flowing than I can handle.

Do you think there is something that non-creatives might struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can shed some light?

It isn’t as prevalent as it once was, but I used to get some pushback from people who didn’t take my work seriously. Thinking that anyone can just make things, put them online, and they’ll sell. They didn’t realize that while I do create my own vision of art, it takes a lot of business strategy and trial and error behind the scenes to make it all work. If I hadn’t evolved and paid attention to the way people view my work and adjusted accordingly, I wouldn’t have survived in this space as long as I have. It’s more than making pretty things and putting them on the internet. Sometimes you have to compromise, sometimes you have to make yourself uncomfortable, sometimes you have to evolve in ways you didn’t think you were capable of becoming. It’s all a balancing act and when you’re making a living as a creative, there is always a sense of being on-edge, a little fear about the future, and constantly having to make sure you are very self aware. I try to be as personable and honest with my followers and customers as I can. There enough fake things on the internet and I don’t want to contribute to that, so at first glance I may look like some typical influencer stereotype, but the more you look into what I post and the things I share, I think you’ll realize I prioritize being real and transparent about my journey and how I landed where I happen to be in this moment.

Contact Info:

• Website: jdrewsilvers.com
• Instagram: @jdrewsilvers
• Facebook: facebook.com/jdrewsilvers
• Other: TikTok: @jdrewsilvers

Image Credits
Jonathan Drew Silvers (me)