
My Story Starting a $400K/Year Handcrafted Furniture Business - patwalls
https://www.starterstory.com/start-handmade-furniture-business
======
wahern
Key moments:

> [A friend] invited me to stay with her and her family who had a billiard
> manufacturer in Ontario in a town called Goderich. This is where we set out
> on a novice adventure to build this chair. We had paper sketches and cheap
> Walmart mock-ups of the seat and that began a year and a half process that I
> thought would take 3 months.

> The next day I flew to San Diego to display the chairs at a tradeshow. A
> friend at Bradley Mountain, a company that makes wax canvas accessories,
> helped me get in.

He bombed at that trade show, but it was an opportunity to fail and,
presumably, to learn how trade shows worked.

> The following year, I attended the Liberty Fairs show in Las Vegas. Later,
> to my surprise, this trade show proved to be a success and a catalyst in
> moving the company forward. I was written up in many publications such as GQ
> and landed several stores across the USA and internationally.

> I landed a deal with Neiman Marcus as a direct result of my own effort and
> new confidence simply by cold calling them.

His legitimate confidence seems quite clearly an _indirect_ result of his two
friends providing opportunities to learn about manufacturing and sales.

The rest of the story is typical for everybody, whether they ultimately
succeed or not--trial + error, tenacity, luck. Luck is random, but having
friends and mentors plugged into the system substitutes for alot of luck.

