We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Luke Martin. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Luke below.
Luke, appreciate you joining us today. So, naming is such a challenge. How did you come up with the name of your brand?
I’ve spent the last decade as a Bomb Disposal Technician with the Canadian Forces. I’ve deployed, instructed and trained all over the world, most recently in Ukraine.
At the end of the day, I need something to help me relax. Something to take my mind off the stress of the day. Eventually, woodworking became the outlet I needed to decompress.
It is my evening activity, and I enjoy it so much I often find myself working away, late into the night. It became my nocturnal passion. When the time came to put a name and a face on my business, it was only fitting that it represent not only what I do, but how I do it. I am a nocturnal woodworker, and my company, is Owl Woodworks.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
All my life, cooking was such an integral and joyous part of my day. From a young age it was cooking in the kitchen with my mother. Stealing and snacking on ingredients when she wasn’t looking. Now, I’m cooking with my wife, and you’d better believe I’m still stealing and snacking on ingredients when she isn’t looking, because I am an absolute child.
When I discovered the joy of woodworking, it was only natural that I merge the two passions. I started out working professionally building custom kitchens, but eventually focused on smaller projects which I could put more effort into perfecting the details of.
I now build cutting boards for a living, but I try to bring a bit more to the table (apologies for that horrific pun) than that. Other than style and design, the major difference between my product and other cutting board makers is my integral plates.
Everyone knows the dilemma of having food on a cutting board that you have to move somewhere like a pan, a plate, the compost. You are either awkwardly sliding food off the edge into your hands, scooping it with your knife, or bringing the whole board over to the pan and wiping it off. For something that many of us use everyday, it bothered me that nobody had figured out an elegant solution to this problem.
There are larger manufactured products with metal trays and such that slide into grooves underneath, but these become a nightmare to clean, they’re quite utilitarian to look at, and if you have an appreciation for finer handmade things, nobody is doing it. Well after years of my own R&D, the thing that now sets me apart are my integral grain matched plates. I cut a scallop into the underside of my boards for the plate to slide under, and turn a plate on my lathe out of the same material as the board so that it all matches seamlessly.
I am of course extremely biased, but the difference this makes in the kitchen is astounding. I will never go back. Being able to just wipe things onto a little plate which is tucked under the board just the right amount and easily move that plate to anywhere in the kitchen is a game changer. It sounds minor, and I agree. Until you think about how often you use a cutting board. Other than work and sleep, humans as a species spend the majority of our time in the kitchen. It’s where we nourish ourselves, feed our family’s, host our friends. It is the heart of the home, and I believe that everything about it should be a joy to use.
In the big picture, it’s pretty small. But at the end of the day, everybody who gets one tells me it has made cooking a more fun and enjoyable experience, and that is why I do what I do.
How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?
The best thing I ever did for my reputation and my business, is make it very clear to everyone that this is not a business. I am not here to make money. I do what I do because I love it. Every post on social media, every conversation I have, I always make it very clear that I am doing this because I love it and I am completely obsessed with it. I never accept orders, I don’t have a sales page. I make exactly what I want, when I want, and then I sell that.
When you’re buying something handmade like this, you don’t want to buy somebodies work. You want to buy their passion, their joy and their excitement. By labelling yourself and marketing yourself as a business, you make it very clear to everyone that your goal is to make money. I market myself as a cutting board fanatic. A person who is obsessed with making the best butting board I can to bring more joy to the experience of cooking. If you can show that you do what you do because you love it, the marketing takes care of itself in a very natural and organic way.
How’d you think through whether to sell directly on your own site or through a platform like Amazon, Etsy, Cratejoy, etc.
I sell my work almost exclusively through my email newsletter. Whenever I have a cutting board available, I send out a newsletter to all my subscribers updating them on what is going on in my business, and show them the board I have available. The first person to respond to the email is then sent an invoice for the board.
This is the fairest way to make my work available to everyone. If I were to take custom orders, I would have enough work to keep me busy for years, but that’s not the goal. The goal is to make the cutting boards I love, and make them available to everyone as fairly as possible.
My newsletter sale system allows me to have complete control and flexibility over how I release my work, and also gives me a constant update on the amount of interest in my work by how many responses I get.
Lastly, it allows me to chat with the buyer of my board and develops a relationship with them. Making the purchasing experience much more personal.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.owlwoodworks.ca
- Instagram: owlwoodworks