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how we made $10k in one month

This is a fun one. Let’s take it back to December 2020. We were wrapping up our first full year in business, we were experiencing our first ever holiday rush, we were making more money than we ever had, and more people were reaching out to us than ever before. To say we were feeling motivated is an understatement.


Today, I’m going to tell you how we made $10,000 in one month.


I’d like to preface this by saying what we did that month, how we worked was incredibly efficient for the time, but long-term, absolutely not sustainable. I’ve worked hard in my life, I’ve put in consistent hours and late nights in school, but nothing even comes close to how hard we worked that month. It was a little absurd, really.


We had a whiteboard calendar on the back of the door in the studio. We would plan out what we wanted or needed to get done each day to stay on track for our delivery dates. This was super helpful for us, just to be able to visualize our timeline for that month, did we have space for another order, could we move things around to get ahead?



On November 28th, we had over a dozen names on our calendar already. We had a deadline of Christmas Eve which was new. We were pushing our limits to see just how far we could go, what’s the most we could handle?


When I think back to this time, I think about how full the studio was. The entire month, we were packed full, and so everyday before we started working, we'd open up the bay door and move everything out into the hallway.



Between the Nissan and December 2020, Brandon and I became skilled in the art of furniture Tetris. We always managed to find a way to make everything fit in a space that was seemingly way too small.


It was just exhausting though. There was this whole process before you even got started and then, even worse, when you were done for the day. Your sights are set on home but first you have to carry twenty-six chairs back inside. And they were finished, painted white, seats on, so you had to be careful not to bump anything or ding a leg.


Despite all that, we were super thankful that we had access to and sort of free-reign over the hallway. We were on a pretty backwards schedule at that point anyway, so we were the only ones on the commercial side of the warehouse most of the time, but we wouldn’t have been able to do what we did that month and in the months following that, if we didn’t have that extra space.


Our calendar was completely full before the month had even started. The last week of November or so, this guy reaches out to us. He tells us that he wants to order a table and bench from us and give it to his mom as her Christmas present. She has a house upstate and he would pick it up from us and drive it up there on his trip up for the holidays.


I mean, how do you say no to that? That was like the most wholesome request ever. We looked at the calendar, we had absolutely nowhere to fit him in realistically, but we wanted to get it done. That was our first ever rush order. We added him onto our schedule and just made our days a little longer because, at the end of the day, that’s why we started building tables in the first place, that’s why it means so much to us. The idea that friends and families are spending time together, gathering around something we made and sharing these special moments, telling stories, making memories, that’s everything.



This is what the studio looked like about midway through December. Every day when we’d come into work, this is what we’d see. We’d move everything, every table, chair, bench and hutch out into the hallway to clear up space and keep them safe and then move them back in at the end of the day. We always tried to keep a bit of a path open, but, more often than not, we would just completely pack ourselves in.


Almost a dozen deliveries, five tables, three benches, twenty three chairs, four hutches, one barn door, two side tables and a side sleeper that month. Thirty-nine pieces of furniture in twenty-three days.


Our final delivery of the year was on December 23rd, just in time for Christmas Eve. We made five stops that day on 30 minutes of sleep. It was close to 5AM the night before and were just now fine-sanding everything we’d polyurethaned the day prior. We left the shop at 7AM only to be back at it with a Uhaul two hours later.


We were on the road that last day from 10AM to 12AM. I remember driving home after we made our last stop just completely exhausted, mentally, physically. It had been dark for seven hours at that point, it was bitterly cold outside, I rolled down the windows and blasted the radio just to keep myself awake and get us home.


Would I do it again? Probably not, it was borderline unsafe. But, am I glad we did it? Absolutely.

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