A furniture maker's first website

First week

The brief was small and honest: look like the furniture. I spent a day in the workshop photographing tools, offcuts and the way the two makers mark their wood, and used those marks as the starting point for the name mark.

Decisions

The identity is one weight of a plain sans with a cut in the O that comes from the makers' own pencil mark. The site has four pages: work, workshop, commissions and contact. Each product page shows the piece, the wood, the time it takes to make and a price range, because the most common question at the stall was how long.

Showing the waiting time up front turned a hard conversation into a booking.

The commission form asks for the room, the size and the date someone needs the piece, nothing more.

The workshop page carries the same marks: a short film of the bench being planed, the two makers at work from behind, and a plain list of the woods they use and where each one comes from. It answers the questions people used to ask at the stall before buying.

Launch

We planned to go live a week before the fair and shipped a week late, on the Friday before it. The delay was mine: the photography took a second day after a week of rain, and I told the makers as soon as I knew, with a new date I could keep. The site still went live before the fair opened.

In the first month, workshop visits tripled, 214 people joined the newsletter and nine products were online with prices. The makers now update the work page themselves after every finished piece.