I'm not a writer. I'm a woodworker.
I've been building cabinets and furniture for over 20 years. Kitchens, built-ins, custom projects, whatever people needed.
StillWood started because of something that bothered me.
A relative asked me if I could fix his mother's urn. The finish was peeling off and it looked pretty rough. He knew I worked with wood, so he asked me to take a look.
When I got it in my hands, I realized there wasn't much to fix.
It wasn't really a wood urn.
It was basically an MDF box with wood-grain sticky paper wrapped around it.
I remember thinking, "Man, this is somebody's mom."
That hit me.
I build kitchen cabinets every day. Even a basic cabinet I build is made from better materials than a lot of the urns I was seeing online.
That didn't make sense to me.
A kitchen cabinet holds pots and pans.
An urn holds someone's memories.
So I told him, "I'm not going to fix this. I'm going to build you a new one."
And I did.
After that, I started paying more attention to what was out there.
I saw a lot of mass-produced urns. A lot of imported urns. A lot of products that looked like they were made as cheaply as possible and then dropshipped from somewhere overseas.
Maybe that's fine for some things.
But it didn't sit right with me when it came to memorials.
I kept thinking that if a family is trusting something to hold the remains of a loved one, it ought to be built well.
Not because it's expensive.
Not because it's fancy.
Because it's important.
That's really where StillWood came from.
I build these urns the same way I build furniture. Solid hardwood. Real joinery. Good materials. No MDF. No wood-grain sticky paper pretending to be wood.
If there's an intarsia design, it's made from real wood too. No paint. No printed graphics.
Everything is built one at a time in my shop in Banning, California.
I'm not trying to build the cheapest urn on the internet.
I'm trying to build something I'd be proud to put a member of my own family in.
That's the whole idea behind StillWood.
