Today we’d like to introduce you to Tanner Rowley
Hi Tanner, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I grew up always loving the creative process, early on it was especially related to crafting and creating physical sculptures or objects, music, and general performance and showmanship. I come from a family that very much encouraged me to explore and enjoy that creativity, but also a pragmatic family that encouraged me to pursue a more traditional career. In school, I was always very adept at STEM related fields, so upon graduating from High School, I went on to get a degree in Biomedical Engineering from The University of Texas.
After I graduated from that, all I wanted to do was go be a product development engineer for the medical device field, specifically I found myself “designing” joint replacement implants and their associated surgical equipment. On paper, this should have checked every box: I got to be super analytical, but I was getting to be creative and design new shapes, ideas, inventions in the form of joint replacement implants. As it turns out, the entire company was responsible for “designing” the new implants, and when you got down to each person’s individual responsibilities, they were very segmented and narrow. A lot of risk mitigation, paperwork, and corporate bureaucracy.
I really wasn’t being creative at all, I really wasn’t being all that analytical either, it was just doing the work to conform to standard operating procedures. I found myself living for the evenings and weekends instead of living for the entirety of my life. I found that my growth and future were being determined by this company, and they owned my time.
I wanted to go be the captain of my own ship, I wanted to go write my own story, I wanted to live an interesting story, I wanted to go set out on an adventure, one that if I succeeded, I would forever have an occupation I genuinely was passionate about. And thus Outer Woods was born.
I started off like any good business should: working out of my parent’s garage. The very first thing I did was go to Fredericksburg and purchase two mesquite live edge slabs from a very sketchy ranch out in the middle of nowhere. I turned both of those into my first two tables, sold them, and calculated that I made about $3.52 an hour if you factor in materials and worked hours. But I had proved the concept that I could make things and sell them, the only “to-do” then was just figure out how to slowly increase the hourly rate that I could charge and figure out how to acquire enough and the right sort of projects. I’ve now been working on that question full time for 4 years.
I’m not sure what other questions there are in this questionnaire. Obviously there is a lot more to the story once I started Outer Woods, but this is a good backstory of everything that happened that got me up until I created this business. If I find that the following questions don’t prompt me to say more about the ins and outs of my business so that I can describe more about how I got to where I am currently today, I’ll add some more information on questions that I see best fit!
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
It has absolutely not been a smooth road to get here. In the beginning of the business, I was buying materials that I thought were cool, then I was creating them into designs and aesthetics that I thought were cool, but I was trying to sell them on Facebook marketplace and Craigslist where people are only looking for deals and cheap things. I couldn’t figure out how to charge more for pieces that were taking me 40 hours to complete, where I was making $300 for all that time. But I also wasn’t all that good at my craft yet, so maybe that’s what I deserved at the time. I also had no pictures of my previous work before I had gone through that stage, so why would anyone want to trust me with a high end custom project yet?
After the grind of developing my woodworking/craftsman skills for about a year doing this model, I finally had enough pictures of my work and enough momentum to where I could finally start reaching out to various people and businesses looking for work – mainly interior designers, office furniture suppliers, new home owners, etc etc. at the same time, I started to get a little word of mouth around my network of friends and family, and I started doing projects for them. This lasted about 2 years doing this type of work, and my hourly rate was now better because I was doing custom work, but I was still just getting by, the work was inconsistent, and the work wasn’t typically in line with the aesthetic and the design that I wanted to build, I was purely making things that my clients wanted me to build, and sometimes they overlapped.
The fourth year of the business, let’s just call it 2024, the demand really picked up, and I was constantly turning out new projects. More of them were in line with styles and aesthetics that I was passionate about. But I was working like an absolute dog to try and meet all of my deadlines, appease all of my custom projects, free up shop room to work on the next table and design.
This brings us to current:
I am trying to figure out how to continue to make high end custom pieces of furniture and art for my clients, I am trying to stay extremely true to the craft, stay authentic to my style and my work, but I am also trying to figure out how else to grow my business so that I can scale the income I am able to earn without having to proportionally scale my labor hours worked.
So the challenges have been a mixture of 1) learning how to even be a great artist and furniture maker 2) learn how to manage grow and scale a business relating to that craft 3) find out how to best earn an honest living doing what I am most passionate about and working a reasonable amount of hours so that I get to live a fulfilling life outside of work.
Appreciate you sharing that. What should we know about Outer Woods ?
Outer Woods is a custom woodworking shop that helps to reintroduce people to authentic, handcrafted, incredibly unique, high end pieces of furniture and art.
If people need help finding pieces of furniture or art that command attention from anyone who walks into that room, if people want pieces of furniture or art that are as unique, authentic, and high quality as their space is, if people want a story about their piece rather than yet another lifeless, mass manufactured pile of particle board, if people want to know the hands that made their dining table where their kids grow up around, Outer Woods can help them.
Where Outer Woods shines the most is creating pieces of furniture or art that have never been done before. We can’t outproduce IKEA making stock dining table that 4 people on your street have. But if you want a dining table where there quite literally are not two of them in the entire world, we run circles around IKEA.
The first step we do to achieve this is using high end and authentic hardwood. No amount of artistry and design can account for boring materials. Luckily, the authentic wood that we utilize for our projects is astonishingly beautiful on its own. The color, the grain, the might to it, and (when using live edge slabs) the shape of it.
The second thing we do extremely differently than others is utilize designs, aesthetics, shapes, and forms that are remarkably creative and unique. Pair that with incredible materials, you’ve already got a winner.
The third thing we offer that is very different is a set of analytical and technical skills because of my background in biomedical engineering and product design. I can tell you the physics behind why wood grain oriented in one direction is stronger than wood grain oriented in another direction. I can do the calculations to determine how big I have to make the base of a table in order for the piece to be very stable in the environment it will be used in. The engineering skills I possess help me to tackle really interesting aesthetics where I’m pushing the bounds of what can be done, and those skills help me to ensure the mechanical quality, durability, and functionality of the pieces throughout their lifetime.
The last thing that my business offers that is incredibly unique from others in this field is my story telling and content creating abilities. It’s one thing if you are able to design and create all these pieces but no one knows they story of how they were created, who the person is that created them, or the story of the business that enabled that piece to be created for a space. I run a robust Instagram account and a growing YouTube account that shines a light on all of that story for my pieces. This gives my clients, my customers, and the general public and remarkably illuminating window into the craftsman and the story.
Those four things set us apart as a business creating handmade pieces of furniture and art.
What would you say have been one of the most important lessons you’ve learned?
I have learned 3 pretty simple lessons to conceptualize, but they are very hard lessons to put into practice.
1) you have to take risks, and you have to follow your passions. To follow your passions is to take a risk. You don’t know how it will pan out, and very few people do it because on paper, most of the time, following your passions equates to less “monetary” success, which is often the measuring stick for general success. But following your passions is absolutely crucial if you want to live a fulfilling life. And passions does not always need to be professional passions, but in the case of this questionnaire, I am talking about following professional passions.
2) tiny incremental steps performed extremely consistently will outperform monumental efforts in the long run the vast majority of the time. I used to go through schooling by studying for tests the day before and pulling all nighters. I then found myself using this method to try to generally get ahead in life but kept finding that I ended up with extremely mediocre results. When you take thousands and thousands of incremental steps, you find yourself leaps and bounds ahead of where you were, but it doesn’t ever feel like it because each step was so insignificant.
3) you are going to want to quit. Don’t quit. The amount of tenacity required to start a small business and make it to year 5 is almost insurmountable. However if you quite literally refuse to quit, you will never fail. Easy to say and write down conceptually, much hard when you are making a terrible income, your friends are making more than you, they have more free time than you, you don’t get to enjoy your hobbies as much because you are working nights and weekends, you don’t know the next steps, you can’t possibly imagine how it will work out. Even in the face of all of that. Don’t quit.
Pricing:
- No pricing information other than people reach out with project inquiries, and I speak with them directly, human to human, to figure out what they need, then I work to provide designs and estimates free of charge.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://Www.outerwoods.net
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/outer_woods/
- Youtube: https://youtube.com/@outer_woods?si=FCLWcy7iixxkGP7A
