We recently connected with Tyler Cadwell and have shared our conversation below.

Tyler, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. How did you come up with the idea for your business?

The inspiration for Everything Etched came from my mother. She came to me one day, showing me a picture of this wine cork holder and saying, “This is what I want for Christmas.” Of course, because she’s my mother, I did as I was told. I created the item by hand and added a personalized touch by engraving the glass. When I finished it and showed it to her, she LOVED it. She loved it so much, she cried.

It was then I saw how a personalized gift could hold such special meaning and could really move someone. I mean, how can we even try to sum up how much someone means to us in a gift? I started Everything Etched to create gifts that solved this problem. I wanted everyone to have access to a truly unique and personalized gift.

Because of the company’s beginning, all of our products go through an intense quality check where we ask, “would we be happy if we were going to gift this to our mother?”

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’m Tyler Cadwell, Founder of Everything Etched where we create personalized gifts through engraving and etching. We have a selection of our own items to choose from, but we also offer engraving services on items that you bring in which provides an opportunity for incredible sentimental connection. For example, we recently engraved an antique telescope for a grandfather who wanted to grant his young grandson’s wish of becoming an adventurer.

I am an entrepreneur at heart. Running my own business felt like an inevitability, it was really just a question of what problem I was going to try to solve. This is where the mom story comes into play. Not everyone can afford to dedicate the time or expense to create a hand-made personalized gift. Companies that were currently offering engraving were stuffy, overpriced, and were very limited in what you were allowed to engrave.

We strive to make the process easy, affordable to all, and without long delays. We can etch or engrave glass, wood, metal, acrylic, leather, and even stone. If you can think it, we can probably etch it. Every week we have someone that comes to us that is in a bind. Whether it’s a bride that has too much on her plate and forgot an important piece for her wedding. Or a husband whose gift isn’t going to arrive in time and now has nothing for their anniversary. We will come through for them. We will create a beautiful piece that steals the show.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

I started the business hand-making products in my parent’s garage. There is still stain and paint all over that garage floor. Two years later I moved into my first office space, quite literally. I was reinvesting all the money into the company so I lived at the office for about a year.

Once I had office space the new challenges were almost humorous. I often like to say that Everything Etched survived a fire, flood, and global pandemic – which is entirely true.

About 5 years ago, I had a machine catch fire one night while I was working late. Luckily, I was able to put it out before it spread to the building but the machine was toast. Since it was my largest machine, I had to work all day, then drive 45 minutes down to the Arizona State University TechShop and use their machines throughout the night.

Then a year or so later, I had an old pipe burst at the office over the weekend. I came in on Sunday to about a foot of water throughout the whole building. The machines were fine and orders weren’t slowing down, so we had to work around the restoration. We used the opportunity to remodel our office and showroom, which I love the way it looks now.

And then, of course, Covid happened causing everyone in the gifting and events industries to question how long can we hold out with this drastic drop in sales? Turns out long enough. We made it out the other side a lot stronger and more capable. A lot of hard times, but I never gave up. Nothing will stop me from achieving my vision for this company.

We’d really appreciate if you could talk to us about how you figured out the manufacturing process.

When I first started, I was engraving everything by hand. It took me about 1 hour per piece. Obviously, this was not scalable, so I looked at the process and asked how I could improve?

After dabbling in vinyl cutters, which is a lengthy process that is too prone to errors, I landed on laser engravers. I didn’t have enough money at the time to buy a US-made engraver, so I took my chances with one from overseas. At the time, that was the largest single purchase I had ever made and it was a big risk for me.

So I get this giant, heavy engraver delivered to my house, almost crushed me trying to get it out of the trailer. I’m very excited to get going and I pull out the manual to learn how to use it – it’s 5 pages long with one of the pages listing the “Do’s and Don’ts” and one of those being “Don’t plug in near a bathtub”. I was on my own. Keep in mind, this is before YouTube was really a thing. So after a lot of trial and (sometimes painful) error, I get this thing up and running. Then the doors just flew wide open. I could engrave glass, wood, metal, leather, everything I could think of. That is the moment the business took a turn from a hobby business to the real deal.

Scaling up has been a whole different experience. We do everything in-house; this allows us to provide industry-leading production time, which helps for those last-minute gifts. Our warehouse is organized into 3 units – engraving, quality control, and shipping. Each unit has its own designated staff and this single direction, assembly-line system is incredibly efficient.

This last year we introduced our proprietary ERP system, made to track every step of a product from order placement, to design, engraving, QA, shipping, and managing inventory and customer communications. This has decreased our order errors to less than 2% and we’ve narrowed the average production time to 24 hours or less.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.everythingetched.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everythingetched/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/everythingetched
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tyler-cadwell-2996b21a/
• Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/everything-etched-scottsdale-2

Image Credits
Anna Jones