Box of Prototypes… Engineering and Manufacturing
This box has been either on our shop floor or in my office for the past 5 years… Nothing has been done with anything in the box, but their journey has forged an amazing story!
If you follow us on facebook, you may have seen my post yesterday.. A box of dollhouse parts, amazing detail, some are just parts while others are still in the “case” that we use to ship. But this box has an amazing story to tell, something that I would never have imagined just over 5 years ago.
In 2008 I had this crazy idea – buy a laser. If you don’t know me yet and you get to know me, you will learn that I am just a big creative nerd and absolutely love the idea of building and creating things. A laser mixed my passion of building things and my love of computers. It was a perfect fit! If you were to ask “why dollhouses?”, I would struggle to tell you the full story. But this is what I remember!
In 2008, I began to look at things that I could build with this new laser I had just purchased – my mind was flush full of things. I had been working in real estate development for the past 10 years, so connecting with architects on scale models was clearly the obvious choice. The truth is, that I wanted to build something new, different and something that would draw on my souls passion – Victorian architecture. What triggered this is truly amazing… during my “research” for a laser, one of the demonstrations cut out an ornate Victorian style chair. about 1″ scale – the rest is history.
Within 3 months, I had designed more than 150 dollhouse parts, which we then sold on ebay, etsy and through our sister site woodvictoriandollhouse.com – after the first year, we had shipped our product to every continent that is inhabited.. Still haven’t shipped anything to Antarctica! Maybe 2014 is our year! But it was amazing to see the Town, Cities and Countries that we received orders from, literally around the world!
This is a custom dollhouse kit which used more than 200 of our dollhouse parts! Follow us on Facebook to see more images.
In 2009 we worked with Bergdorf Goodman (I had no clue who they were, my wife let me in on what they sell)… Well, each year during Christmas time, they are renowned for their amazing window displays–in 2009 they wanted to build a dollhouse in a tree. We worked with them to produce more than 200 individual dollhouse parts, each were integrated into their custom dollhouse! the end result was amazing…
Around that same time, I connected with an individual who shared the same creativity and passion for building things, 3 weeks later – we joined forces! Since, he has helped craft the product into new directions, adding kits, buildings and offering custom dollhouse kits that are truly breath-taking!
For the past 3 years or so, we have talked about really focusing on our products… Honestly, we have been so busy with the day to day that we just didn’t have time. We ultimately had to get things started – somewhere – so we launched dollhouseparts.com and made a commitment to build our products, offer engaging customer service and to just have fun! We are actively seeking wholesalers, to add our dollhouse parts to your store and/or website–but we just want to enjoy the craft, have fun, meet people and build relationships that give us all a chance to share our passion.
My box of dollhouse parts is sitting 4′ from me right now. I still don’t know what to do with all of them… Perhaps we will just build a crazy dollhouse kit, something that can be fun, wild and ultimately remind us why we do what we do! To have fun and be creative… We are so grateful to our customers and everyone that has shared our product online! We hope that we can build and become a company that you think of first. Please help us know what we should build next, let’s make stuff!
– Chris
