We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Molly Meierding a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Molly, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?
Our story is simple, a mental health therapist and special education teacher were stuck at home for 9 months during quarantine with a newborn and needed an outlet. It started with DIY projects at our new home and quickly expanded into exploring the wonderful world of woodworking and we’ve never looked back. It has been an amazing way to build our relationship and share our passion with others. We began expanding to having our handmade wooden games in breweries and other establishments last year and now currently have products in 30+ breweries and establishments across the state of MN and WI!
Molly, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
As we stated previously, we started with DIY projects around our house. We began posting our projects on our personal social media accounts and gained interest from others. We started taking custom orders and making new products to sell at pop ups and other establishments. We started out small with our customer base being mostly family and friends. As we’ve grown, we have struggled with balancing our full-time jobs, two kiddos (we just had a baby last summer!) and fulfilling all of our orders. We mostly get our work done in small pockets of time and after the kids go to bed, sometimes sleep sounds a whole lot better than working more. So we are still trying to figure out our groove and what works for us as a family of four. One thing we pride ourselves on is continuously giving to causes that matter to us despite how busy we get. We love to create products to donate for silent auctions or to be raffled off for an important cause. Our areas of interest are mental health/suicide prevention, LGBTQIA+ affirming nonprofits, and other marginalized communities.
Okay – so how did you figure out the manufacturing part? Did you have prior experience?
Everything we make is handmade. We make a wide range of products and while we probably should start to narrow down our scope, we love a new challenge and are constantly inspired by new projects. We started with simple tools and have since expanded to more complex- including different types of saws, routers, sanders, etc. While we continuously talk about diving into the world of CNC/laser produced products, we like to say that everything we make is handcut, sanded, and made- no product is the same. Each piece of wood is hand selected and may have perfect imperfections such as grain variations or knots. Everything is hand painted or stained in our garage workspace. We like to think every piece is one of a kind.
Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?
Not necessarily speaking to our resilience, but our successes or what we define as success. First, returning customers, we love when customers love our products enough to order again! Second, we enjoy seeing our product being used in the “wild”- whether we see customers using our items at breweries/bars in person or posts on Instagram. Lastly, we love mastering a new project. It’s great to be challenged by innovative creative custom projects by customers (and that they trust us to create for them!)
Contact Info:
- Website: meierdingmade.com
- Instagram: @MeierdingMade
- Facebook: @MeierdingMade