"Custom Woodworking", what does it mean?

[KeithJuly]

Recently, I was working on a new header for my web site. Well, I don’t mean working on the site itself, my son Michael does the technical part. www.mikejuly.com . I was putting together a few ideas for him to incorporate into the new look and to make my web site more user friendly. I had decided to feature “Custom Woodworking” and support it with a short bio about my business.

Per Mike’s suggestion, I did a little research on Google Adwords, www.adwords.google.com and found a gazillion references to “custom”. OK, maybe not a gazillion but several hundred million. Listed were thousands of sites for custom cabinets, custom furniture and custom kitchens ( just to name a few) and at first I thought,wow, there are a lot of people in the business of building custom everything. , Using Google, I dug a little deeper and found everything from custom cars to custom t shirts to custom finger nails and we can’t forget custom nose hair trimmers. It’s true, you can’t make this stuff up. Is the word “Custom” over used to the point that it’s no longer taken seriously? Has it become a tag that’s added to everything without justification? More specifically, is it meaningful when attached to woodworking?

Custom

(Or “bespoke”) An adjective describing any product that is special in some way, individually created for a specific user or system, as opposed to generic or off-the-shelf. Source: Free Online Dictionary of Computing http://foldoc.org/custom

How would you define custom woodworking? Do you think the tag “Custom” is over used?

By the way, I am reconsidering using “Custom Woodworking” in the title page of my web site.

Keith

[Bombarde16]

Wow. Think ya opened a big enough can of worms, Butch?

FWIW, "Custom" is part of a (semi) universally understood vocabulary when discussing kitchens. To wit:

• Stock cabinets - Everything comes off a shelf in a warehouse with nothing more to do on site aside from fitting and fastening.
  
• Semi-stock cabinets - A large, gray area in which lots of parts come from a factory, but these can be either heavily modified (i.e. ditch the doors and replace them with something fancy...or ditch the carcases and use the doors elsewhere, etc.) or augmented with a few pieces built on site.
  
• Custom cabinets - A truck drops a pile of lumber in the driveway.
  

But custom woodworking to me implies more than this because a piece can still start from raw lumber and not have the personality that we look for in custom work. Perhaps "artisan" is a better word: "A skilled manual worker who makes items that may be functional or strictly decorative." Custom woodworking implies a certain one-off nature to the work. A custom woodworker might batch out a number of pieces of similar or identical spec (i.e. Krenov's cabinets, Nakashima's Conoid chair, Jarvi's one-piece bench, etc.) but it never crosses the line into the sort of quantity that would diminish what we perceive as a personality in each piece. i.e. If Marc made another gadget station for someone, that wouldn't diminish the custom nature of what he does. If he outsourced his gadget station to Jiangxi province and started importing them in thousand-unit lots, that would cross the line.

Then there's also a question of design. A custom woodworker, to my mind, needs also to be a designer as well as builder. Someone capable of running a project from a blank sheet of paper all the way through the final coat of varnish.

Custom work is something that you can't order out of a catalog and is never "in stock" because no stock exists. Every piece involves first establishing a rapport between artist and client to get the project going. Precisely for this reason then is custom work so unique: It attracts clients with requirements that are well off the beaten path, people who can't get what they need off the shelf.

Random thoughts but I hope it helps.

[Rick LoDico]

I think it has a nice ring to it

http://www.woodnaut.com/

[KeithJuly]

Rick,

Visited your web site...the shop crane is a great idea.

Rob,

Your bullet points are right on.

Quote:

Then there's also a question of design. A custom woodworker, to my mind, needs also to be a designer as well as builder. Someone capable of running a project from a blank sheet of paper all the way through the final coat of varnish.

End Quote:

I count not agree more. The design/build aspect of custom woodworking is what sets it apart from the "off the shelf" woodworking.

Thank you for the well thought out comment.

Keith

P.S.

Where do you change the setting to be notified when someone responds to a post?

I am not being notified and don't know when someone comments.

Thanks

Keith

[bywc]

I agree its over used to the point in today's "buzzword" society that everything needs a catchy slogan or name associated with it for it to be successful words like "custom" have just become another gimmick to me like "Handmade" that has no credit or value in a title anymore for me and many I speak to as handmade is placed on so much mass produced junk that if a hand installed even a minute part suddenly its called handmade not when I was growing up handmade meant every aspect of said piece was produced by hand.

To me when I think of the word custom every piece produced is different even in a slight way which is dictated by the person purchasing it the best example I can think of is a Tattoo if you walk in and pick a tattoo off the wall and have it put straight onto your arm its not custom if you take in your own design or the tattoo artist designs one CUSTOM for you or even if you take elements from multiple tattoos on the wall then it is custom but in my opinion the second a replication is done even once it is no long custom i think it should be labeled reproduction because in my book only the first ever piece was custom everything after that is a reproduction of the original custom piece.

[Pete Bennett]

Bespoke is a much more meaningful word to use. Also Designer/Maker of Bespoke furniture. Which says it all really. It's certainly what I have on my website and buried somewhere in the key words. Which I'm sure your son will know all about. Cos' they're critical for Google et al.

[PaulMarcel]

P.S.

Where do you change the setting to be notified when someone responds to a post?

I am not being notified and don't know when someone comments.

Thanks

Keith

Hi, Keith,

You likely found it already, but scroll to the top of this page and click the "Follow This Topic" button and you'll get a copy of replies in email (by default; you can control that in your settings/notifications). Click it again to stop following.

[KeithJuly]

Hello Paul,

Thanks for taking to time to respond.

It was right there in front of my nose. :--)

Thanks

Keith

Hi, Keith,

You likely found it already, but scroll to the top of this page and click the "Follow This Topic" button and you'll get a copy of replies in email (by default; you can control that in your settings/notifications). Click it again to stop following.

[PaulMarcel]

Hello Paul,

Thanks for taking to time to respond.

It was right there in front of my nose. :--)

Thanks

Keith

No problemo (hey, that's my limit in Spanish :))

Actually, I should respond to the original topic! I completely agree with you that there are far too many custom nose hair clippers available these days and I'm having difficulty deciding which to use. No, seriously, the 'custom' moniker is hugely overused. I'm not sure, though, if people not analyzing it will notice, however. For example, if I wanted a custom piece of furniture (which is still the correct term), I'd Google 'custom furniture' so at least your site's meta-data should include 'custom furniture' (and 'Megan Fox' if you want to get a ridiculous number of hits). Sites that would catch my attention in the results list would be those using more artsy names since that would be what I'd look for. "<your name> Woodworking" might not do it. Well, maybe if it was "Megan Fox Woodworking".

P.S., this week, you'd want "Michael Oher" in your meta data Not even sure who he is.

[Rapid Roger]

To replace the word 'Custom' my first responce is, 'Hand Made'. For people wanting special attention paid to something, I think they would want 'hand made wood working' instead of 'machinery' or 'assembly line' made.

I think it just sounds like a more personal attention is used in the making of an item.

Just my two centovos worth. (don't speek or write spanish well either )

Rog

[KeithJuly]

Hi Roger,

Quote,

"the 'custom' moniker is hugely overused. I'm not sure, though, if people not analyzing it will notice" End Quote.

I agree and I may be over analyzing this. I am really trying to look at this from the customers view point( or someone searching the internet)

I have been thinking about this so much, I think it's time for a break. Maybe I'll try something new....maybe learn Spanish. :-)

no habla inglés

Thanks

Keith (which means Keith in Spanish, direct translation from the English to Spanish translator)

How do you say "custom nose hair clipper" in Spanish.

[Bombarde16]

To replace the word 'Custom' my first responce is, 'Hand Made'.

This is even more problematic. In our 2-year old's room is a small mountain of toys, puzzles, games, etc. and some of these were made by hand. The hands, mind you, were those of semi-skilled, underpaid laborers in faraway lands -- folks who lack all creative vision and who churn out (by hand) uninspired trinkets rain or shine. And then there's someone like Charles Neil with a shelf of ten routers, or the folks at Orange County Choppers who use computer controlled water jet cutters to make parts for motorcycles.

Hands have nothing to do with it.

podadoras personalizados de cabello nasal

[Rapid Roger]

OK,OK! Lets leave "hands" out of it!

Granted, Orange County Choppers use some far-out machinery and Charles Neal may have 10 routers but, they both make some very specilaized and unique items. So let me lay this on on the table....How about.... "Personalized Wood Working"?

I'm new to this hobby and do use a few hand tools on my projects but, I still need my hands to turn on my table saw, miter saw and scroll saw not to mention guiding the wood as I use them.

My stuff may not be "custom" but it is always "personalized" because I hardly ever make any two things the same. Not that I don't try mind you, but they just come out that way.

Rog

[Lawrence Brown]

So on the original topic of google adwords: the point of those keywords is to try to capture as many hits from customer searches as possible, and the most-used term that the average person will use is "custom". There's just no way around it. If you are depending on those searches for business, then you need the words "custom, woodworking, furniture, table, chair, desk, bed", etc. and maybe both "hand-made" and "hand made" just to be safe. It can be annoying and depersonalizing, but that's just business.

However, that doesn't necessarily mean you have to use those particular words on your site. The generic search terms get the potential client there, then you can set yourself apart with original content and descriptions. And of course this is where examples of your work should do the selling.

So yes, "custom" is overused, but then again we're now dealing with connections to potentially the population of the entire planet, which is a good and bad thing because pretty much every descriptive word in existance has already been, or soon will be, overused.

At this point I think the best thing to do is just use what you think best describes you and makes you happiest and let your work speak for itself.

[KeithJuly]

Hello M,

Thank you for a very insightful and concise comment.

Get them in the door with the right words and then the pictures of my work do the talking.

Thanks

Keith

[PaulMarcel]

M has it right. Remember that adwords lets you set meta data for your page. Even if you don't want to deal with adwords, you can supply the crawlers/spiders with meta data in your home page's <META> tag. In that way, you can list all the boring overused words you don't want on your page, but the crawler will actually weigh more (it treats them as keywords).

A useful exercise for you to do for choosing your keywords is to do a bunch of searches for thing in and around your product. "Custom tables", "replica blanket chests", "period smokeless ashtrays" (oh, 'period', now that's overused or at least inappropriately used). Look at the first page of hits and see: 1) are they vendors targeting the same audience? 2) is the page woefully out of date? If they have the same audience, look at their meta data (view source of the page and look for the META tag for crawlers; near the top of the homepage). If the page is woefully out of date, you might want to still target their keywords since your page will show up first (newer) for that search.

You can do a lot before hiring a SEO expert. In a sense, the above Googling exercise gives you a landscape of your competition, which is always useful research.

[Lawrence Brown]

And just to make things more confusing, but in a good way, there's more good info in this thread.