Three brothers in the Appalachian Mountains in Virginia have teamed up to create a business from their combined love of and skills in craft work. F&C meets the Alexander brothers.
Shea Alexander grew up in a home in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley that was filled with the love of craft. His father Tim was looking for a hobby when his children were little and found Drew Langsner’s book Country Woodcraft, which sparked an interest in folk woodcarving. ‘The oldest two of us brothers would have been exposed to woodworking when we were still in diapers,’ Shea tells F&C. Shea is the second oldest of six siblings: five boys and a girl. His older brother Drew is a blacksmith, Shea makes furniture and their younger brother Josiah, or Joe, is a leather worker. Together the trio created the Alexander Brothers, combining their hobby crafts into what has become a flourishing business.
‘There was never a time in my life that I wasn’t doing some type of woodworking,’ says Shea. His mother studied journalism and was a prolific reader who took her children to the library regularly. If the youngsters wanted to do something, they would seek out a book that taught them how, and then get on with it. By the time they were in their teens, Drew and Shea were throwing themselves into their chosen crafts.
‘Drew saw a blacksmith at a country fair and told our dad he wanted to do that, so my parents sought out an apprenticeship for him when he was in middle school – he worked in a living history museum with a master blacksmith when he was maybe 15 or 16,’ Shea says. He himself started carving spoons under his father’s instruction when he was very little and, by the time he was 11, was carving roosters to sell at local festivals. He was in high school when he started working for a cabinet shop making commercial custom kitchens. The shop owner had previously worked in furniture making, and coached Shea through his own personal projects.
The first furniture piece he made was a Shaker candle stand with three turned legs, which he made after reading an article by Christian Becksvoort in Fine Woodworking magazine at the age of 13 or 14. He recently came across his original sketches for the projects and a log of the hours he had worked on it. ‘I sent it to my older brother and he asked how long it would take me to make it nowadays. It took me nine and a half hours then, and would probably not take much less now. It was kind of cool to see that.’
The youngest brother in the business, Joe, got interested in leather craft early in high school, and mainly taught himself the skills, connecting with other leather workers in the area doing different things, from horse tack to more artistic work. ‘We all gravitated towards our own type of craft work, but we pursued other things in terms of our careers,’ Shea says. Drew went into the construction sector, doing period home restorations, and Joe became an electrician. ‘I spent what would be most people’s college years doing humanitarian work overseas, then came back and worked in business operations in a corporate setting,’ Shea says.
Building a business
The brothers continued doing their craft work as a hobby, often combining their separate disciplines to build things together. ‘It became part of the conversation to ask: if each one of us doesn’t feel we can do this full time on our own, can we do it full time together? Could all three crafts support each other?’ Shea says. After a couple of years of discussions, the Alexander Brothers launched in 2018, although all three brothers initially continued with their employed work and moved into their own business gradually. ‘Now there are the three of us brothers and we have three part-time employees,’ says Shea.
They also opened a lumberyard, which he says came about ‘just by happenstance’. ‘We live in the middle of Appalachia so hardwoods are everywhere,’ he says. ‘Most are harvested and sawn for the commodity sector and sent overseas. In our area there is very little local wood available in terms of a good retail experience for small hobby woodworkers, cabinetmakers and furniture makers. If they wanted local woods, they would have to go to an industrial saw yard and inconvenience someone to pull out a bundle and let them sort through it.’
Shea found it hard to find the types of wood he wanted for furniture, so he started buying logs, sawing and drying them himself. He ended up with excess, which he then sold on to other makers, and the lumberyard grew from there. ‘It is centred around making local Appalachian hardwoods available to small hobbyist and semi-professional furniture makers and woodworkers,’ he says. ‘We are trying to divert some material from the commodities market towards the furniture side of things. It is a fairly small operation, but I try to keep a myriad of species available, and we are geared towards people being able to seek out a specific piece for a project, no matter how small or how big.’ He also kilns and dries wood for other makers, and occasionally planes or surfaces wood for others. ‘We help other crafters with the wood side,’ he explains. ‘We are building commissions, but we also have a steady flow of small mill projects and lumber retail going on at the same time.’
A room of one’s own
Shea fulfilled a lifelong dream when he built his own workshop at his home, logging the trees out of the woods, sawing them and building the two-storey space with the help of his brothers and friends. Knowing that the 30 x 40ft workshop with 10ft ceilings would not be big enough long term, he planned for it to become a family garage in time, and upstairs from the workshop are the business’s office space and Joe’s leather studio. Drew’s forge is in a different location, and the lumberyard is on a third property, not far from Shea’s home. The business has now pretty much outgrown the original workshop and a new, 30 x 56ft building is under construction at the lumberyard property. ‘That will be a welcome change, with more square feet and less running back and forth,’ he says.
The three arms of the business have their own clients, with Shea and Drew working mainly on individual commissions and Joe also doing some retail at art shows and wholesale, the latter mainly handbags and belts sold in small local boutiques. But the brothers also love to collaborate on pieces that cross the three disciplines and to include each other’s materials. For Shea that can mean making a wooden bench upholstered in leather or a leather-topped table, or incorporating metal door and drawer pulls. But it also works the other way: he might make wooden elements for the more architectural pieces Drew creates in his blacksmith forge, such as wooden railings for indoor pieces. ‘We have been blessed to build a client base of customers who want us to build in all the media, so that in the same home they have work from all the different brothers, but we are working on it together,’ he says.
The brothers are very close, and when they decided to go into business together asked themselves very serious questions about how it might affect their relationships. ‘A lot of family businesses end with people not speaking, so we made our relationship as family the number one priority. If business is going to harm our family, we can flush the business and move on.’ But in practice, although there are some differences of opinion, the three work very well together, particularly as they each have their own areas of expertise and autonomy. That works for the management side of the business as well as their own crafts, with Drew handling sales for the whole business, Joe organising shows and scheduling and Shea overseeing management.
He notes that there is a big difference between being creative in a craft and the creativity entailed in entrepreneurship. ‘A true entrepreneur is creating a business as a functioning entity,’ he explains. ‘A lot of makers get hung up trying to make a business, so in some ways us three collaborating on the business side has been pretty healthy. Each one of us has our craft and our space of the business that we are in charge of, based on our skillsets, and we make that a strength for the three of us.’
Launching in 2018, the business was very young when the Covid-19 pandemic and lockdowns hit, but Shea says it turned out well for them. ‘At least here in the States, most people were staying home from work and weren’t going out to eat or have a social life. They had more disposable income and were staying at home, so a lot of them decided: hey, it’s time to redecorate the room, and then they needed a new piece of furniture. Lumber sales also stayed very strong. A lot of people took on projects or started woodworking as a hobby. The pandemic was a very good thing for us as a business, it kept us very busy.’
A composition of influences
Shea has had no formal training in furniture since his time working in the cabinet shop, but has built up his skillset through a lot of reading and thanks to a number of informal mentors, the most recent of whom is chair maker Jeff Lefkowitz, who has been mentoring him in building ladder-back chairs. ‘A lot of craftspeople pride themselves on being self-made and educated, but all of us are influenced by others through our entire lives, and we often don’t stop to recognise how many different people have impacted us and formed us into who we are,’ he says. A couple of years ago Shea started a list of all the people who have helped him through the years, from someone who planed a board down for him when he was 10 years old to an adult who showed him how to put a joint together properly when he was 13. Now, whenever he remembers someone who has helped him over the years, he will add them to the list. ‘If you stop and think about it we are really just a composition of the people around us that have impacted our life in some way,’ he says. Nevertheless he admits to lamenting at times his lack of formal training in furniture design.
He works with a mixture of hand tools and industrial machinery, some of which has been imported from England and lovingly restored. ‘We cut all our dovetails by hand,’ he says. Chairs are also made mainly by hand, while he also uses Festool equipment as well as bigger machines for larger scale projects. Shea takes care not to get lost in what he calls an obsession with ‘workshops and widgets’, or with glamourising certain types of tools or workshop spaces.
‘To me it is about the craft and the actual making,’ he says. ‘As a woodworker I’m very thrifty when it comes to tools – I don’t mean buying cheap things, but if I don’t use it on a regular basis I move it along. A lot of woodworkers are collectors or small-time hoarders, but my hand tool space is pretty precious. At the end of the day I’m making a living for myself, my employees and my brothers. If I have two of something, the second one will be given away or sold off to make room.’ Shea is very conscious of the many people who invested in him when he was starting out, so he is keen to pass on excess equipment to younger woodworkers to help them out. ‘I often get asked how I put out as many pieces of furniture as I do. Part of that is not getting caught up in the tools, jobs, workshops and widgets but focusing on the work,’ he says. He notes that sometimes he will manage without a particular tool for ‘too long’ before giving in and buying it, but says that is better than buying the wrong tool and wasting time and money on it. ‘Everything is well used and well loved,’ he says.
PHOTOGRAPHS: HARLEIGH CUPP, @HARLEIGH.AT.HEAR