Creative Souls: The Potter Family of Waitsfield

The Potter family of Waitsfield has built a creative arts economy all by itself.

"It's about taking the simple threads of art and trying to work them into the public world," said Sparky Potter, 62, patriarch and founder of the innovative Wood & Wood Sign Systems – Ben & Jerry's Homemade three-dimensional signs are among his creations.

Peggy Potter, his wife, is just winding down a 20-year career making and selling the high-end painted wood bowls that have won her national recognition.

One daughter, Charlotte, 28, is a glass blower. Son Lee, 24, is a poet.

And then there is the middle child, Grace, 26, whose band, “Grace Potter and the Nocturnals,” was named one of Rolling Stone Magazine's "Best New Bands of 2010."

How does a family get into arts entrepreneurship? Sparky grew up in Weathersfield, CT, watching his father run his own insurance company. Early on, he saw the romance in running his own business and tried to imbue the value in his children.

"I tried to do something with my three kids that my parents didn't think to do with me," Sparky said. "I tried to help them know, from an early age, what it means to be self-employed. I did it by taking some of the money we were going to dedicate to their colleges and helping them form businesses in high school. Now both Charlie and Grace are self-employed. They have a much better starting point than I did. I got my ass kicked in business early on because I just didn't know much about anything. I didn't have any background. I just had will."

According to Grace, she and her sister took to entrepreneurship like "a dog and sock." In high school, they made decorative refrigerator magnets – Fridge Follies – and sold them at the farmers market. Eventually they created their own company, Babaja Wall Therapy.

"We would come into people's houses and invigorate their spaces with color and murals," Grace said. "Sometimes it was simple paint jobs. We sort of supported ourselves for quite a few summers doing that."

Now Grace appears to have entrepreneurship down cold. She was recently in the news for helping Lake Champlain Chocolate create a new product that blends chocolate, pepper flakes and pistachio nuts. It's called "Grace Under Fire," and she and her band will market it across the country. Helping Vermont products reach a national audience is something Grace feels strongly about.

"We're trying to slowly develop relationships with Vermont companies and become a taste maker and exporter of very specific made-in-Vermont items," Grace said. "For the last year and a half we've teamed up with Cabot Creamery to create the institution of cheese and rock and roll. Our tour bus has been wrapped in a Cabot Cheddar logo. They have sponsored our tours and sent their cheese out on the road. We've had cheese tasting at concerts. Much like that, chocolate and rock and roll are both very sensual things. We want to share Lake Champlain Chocolate with the world. Eventually, my vision is to create somewhat of a boutique of Vermont flavors, the things that make Vermont unique in a way that doesn't exploit them. Like Magic Hat Beer, Ben & Jerry's ice cream, and Green Mountain Salsa, Vermont is what makes this band."

Vermont is all about being entrepreneurial, Grace said.

"Vermont is a state people go to be enterprising," she said. "You don't move to Vermont unless you have a do-it-yourself mentality. You want to open a restaurant, start some kind of technology firm, work with wind power. These are forward-thinking missions, and Vermont is sort of a Petri dish for inspiration and vision. And if those companies grow enough, they can move beyond the borders of Vermont, as we did as a band. But you never stop being from Vermont."

Creative genes run deep on both sides of the Potter family. Although his father was an insurance man and his mother was a politician, Sparky – born Richard Potter in Weathersfield, CT – had one grandmother who designed costumes for Roy Rogers and Dale Evans and another who made Chippendale trays in her basement and taught piano. And Peggy's father was a student member of the Nobel Prize-winning team that invented the transistor; as an inventor, he held many patents.

But before we go any further, we need to get the name "Sparky" out of the way. It's hardly an expected name for a family patriarch.

"I took the first nickname that came my way, because I didn't like Rich or Ricky or Dick," Sparky said. "I went to Saint Lawrence University, and after a week somebody named me Sparky. And I said, 'OK, let it sit.' After four years, it was starting to seem remotely credible, so I kept it. Turns out a lot of people have that same nickname. There's Sparky the Firedog, and baseball pitcher Sparky Lyle. I figured if he can hang on to it, I can. Since then, I've met a lot of cool people with the name, including a lot of electricians. So I'll keep it."

It's not a bad nickname for a small, handsome, dynamic man who exudes goodwill, humor, spirit and a sense of adventure. Being a lifetime skier, a bicycle rider, and a hockey player has kept him fit and energetic.

"I would describe him as a man of passions," said Grace. "If it's not fun, why do it? My dad is the ultimate tenant of that feeling. He finds joy in every single thing he does. He's 25 years older than everyone else on the hockey team he plays with. He does everything with such gusto and belief that it's almost an impossibility for him not to enjoy himself."

A close friend of the Potter family is Melinda Moulton, who also hired Sparky to work on the signage for her redevelopment project, Main Street Landing in Burlington. She said that calling him "a spark plug" was just about right.

"Whenever I meet with him I'm so energized," Moulton said. "He sends across this good, happy, vibrant energy. He's one of those special people who can fill a room with his joy."

Back in the 1970s, as a diehard hippie in love with wood, Sparky helped invent the kind of creative, colorful, carved wooden signs that are now so commonplace in New England.

"He's a creative soul," said Ken Russak, the general manager of Ben & Jerry's Homemade company stores. "Sparky's always been our sign designer and manufacturer. What I like about Sparky is that he takes a two-dimensional concept and brings it to three dimensions. It's his touch that creates what we consider the ultimate Ben & Jerry's look."

Wood & Wood employs 10 people. Its sales range from $600,000 to $1 million, depending on the year.

"The beginning of this year was awful," Sparky said. "It was like falling off a cliff. The same thing happened last year. January, February and March are typically our slowest months – dead-in-the-water slow. But in spring, human nature gets better. People get more excited and more gutsy about what they do in their life and things pick up. We're really busy right now."

When times get tough, Sparky and his employees just go skiing. So he's never had to lay people off.

"Everybody knows the gig gets slow in the winter, so we didn't have to let people go," Sparky said. "Often when it gets slow, we start experimenting and building things, and we seem to be able to sell all that stuff. My wife Peg has the Artisan's Gallery in Waitsfield, so she is one of the distributors. We also use the Internet and place things on consignment in the Adirondacks and Connecticut. We like to try out new ideas."

Early Years

Sparky is the oldest of two boys.

"Most of my family is in the insurance business because that's what you do down there in Hartford," Sparky said. "But my mother became deputy mayor of Weathersfield. She's very politically active. She's very cool. She was a real giver and involved in every club you can imagine."

He started skiing when he was just seven.

"My father was from Colorado, so he would take anybody who would go with him up to Mount Snow first, and then to Stratton," Sparky said. "We probably went for two weekends every winter month, and that's how I got ingrained in Vermont."

His first job in Weathersfield was mounting ski bindings to earn money for equipment.

"By 16, I'd been skiing for a bunch of years," Sparky said. "I wanted cheap equipment, and this guy was great. He put me in a corner mounting all this stuff. I used tools for the first time. It was my first ever connection with tools and playing with making things."

By the time he was in high school, Sparky, his brother, his cousin and some friends had started a successful painting company.

"I did it from the time I was 16 to the time I was 23 and moved up here," Sparky said. "At college, my room and board was paid by my parents so it was pure cash. We made enough so we could all go to Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket for two weeks at the end of August. I dearly loved big-stroke painting, being on ladders and being acrobatic. Also I loved being the liaison between the clients and the people who worked for us. So I got good schooling at how to be self-employed."

Ski Bum Sparky

Sparky was a senior at Saint Lawrence University when he met Peggy, who was then a freshman. They've been married for 35 years. Grace Potter calls Peggy her father's muse.

"Mom is such a creator," Grace said. "She is the creator, not only of me and my lovely sister and brother. She was the nurturer. She dreams about the fire that makes my dad do what he does. Everything she does, she does 150 percent."

During his senior year, Sparky became interested in painting and in burning designs into wood. His favorite styles were Currier & Ives and Olde English.

"My grandmother gave me a paint set when I was 12 that I kept with me, and a wood burning tool," he said. "I got pieces of wood from broken down barns. I started drawing stuff and realized it came pretty easily. With the wood burning, I tried to imitate a pen-and-ink drawing on wood. I realized I loved to do it. So my senior year at college was all about arts and crafts."

While Peggy continued on at college – she graduated with a degree in religion and philosophy – Sparky, who took a degree in history, went out to Colorado in 1970 to be a ski bum.

"By then I was a committed skier," Sparky said. "I had two drives – skiing and painting. I started melding the two together. My best friend and I went in the summer and got great jobs painting new condominiums. During the holidays it was too expensive to rent a house, so we lived in a van. It got cold and we ran out of money and I ended up back in Vermont, played out."

Through friends of the family, Sparky got a job selling outdoor gear in a store in Waitsfield. His fraternity had a ski house in town, so he was able to live rent free as a caretaker. And he joined the ski patrol.

"I was awful at selling clothing, but my day job on ski patrol was great," he said. "It was an adventure. We got good at first aid, saw a lot of wrecks. Mostly it was the camaraderie, being there at seven in the morning and skiing until 4:30 in the afternoon, going out partying with those people. To this day, if I travel to any ski resort, when they learn I was on paid ski patrol at a decent ski area, the red carpet is out."

Wood & Signs

Before the early 1970s, signs were a take-it-or-leave-it kind of thing; not too many people paid attention to them. As Sparky says, "Since the 1300s, they've just been objects. If you were selling wine you had some grapes out there. If you were selling beer you had some hops. If you were a farmer, you had a cow."

But the ‘70s changed that. A few creative sign designers, primarily artists and wood carvers like Sparky, began to create a new niche in New England: signs as public art.

"I didn't set out to do that, but when I did something pretty cool, and it got out to the public, I started getting comments," Sparky said. "The response attracted me. So I'm amongst the first group of people who attempted to take the sign industry in a different direction. Now many towns have rewritten their ordinances to require only signs that are handsome, are wood signs, that encourage three dimensionality, that are pieces of art."

Sparky and a ski patrol partner started making signs commercially in 1972.

"At first I called it Signs & Things," Sparky said. "We worked for a few months together, but it didn't work out. Then I got a garage downtown and worked by myself for two years in the summers. Winter I did ski patrol. I taught myself to hand carve, to do wood burning, to build furniture. It was lonely, but it was downtown so people were always stopping by. Peg would spend the summers here and then go back to Saint Lawrence. By her senior year, with work study, she was teaching here."

In partnership with Peggy, Sparky created a new company, Wood & Wood, in the mid-1970s.

"By then I knew I was committed to doing this," he said. "I named it because I had affinity to wood. I have no idea why I had this complete, compelling love of wood. I didn't know if I would be doing signs or murals or furniture. I picked an ambiguous name. It's strange, because over the past 30 years, I've learned to love every material out there. Wood is a relatively small part of what we work with now."

In fact, Wood & Wood is developing new ways to work with plastics; a huge Dunkin' Donuts sign made out of Styrofoam was being painted in the shop on the day of our interview.

At first, Sparky's father was disapproving.

"He wanted me to come into his business," Sparky said. "He said, 'Why are you going to Vermont? You're never going to pull this off.' And that was the biggest inspiration he could give me. I had to prove he was wrong."

Once he did, Sparky's father became his biggest ally.

"He gave his knowledge," Sparky said. "He started applying his insurance knowledge. 'Why don't you think about maintenance as something you can do on a regular schedule?' he said. He was right. Signs get older, so give customers a maintenance plan and get back to them every five or 10 years or so. 'You spend $100 right now, and I'll come back and paint your sign five years from now.' I would never have thought of that. And he helped teach me about financing."

A business high point came when Sparky was hired by his home town to design and build the town signs. He chose a design based on the thresholds of houses in Colonial New England. The signs say, "Welcome to Weathersfield, most ancient town, 1634." And since the town was famous for its onions, Sparky put a painted onion at the top.

"I had a chance to give back to the town that helped to frame my love of architecture," Sparky said. "Weathersfield is like the archeology of American architecture." 

Mistake after Mistake

On his journey from hippie to creative businessman, Sparky said he made every mistake in the book.

"I didn't know how to estimate correctly," he said. "I was clueless about how to make money. That's why the first five years were pretty much nonprofit years. Peg was supporting me. She had a waitress job and was making tons of money. I kept making mistake after mistake. It was all just part of my learning curve. I had to learn how to make stuff, how to do my books, I had to learn about contracts and how to make things safe."

Contracts were especially important.

"Say you want a $1,000 sign or table," Sparky said. "Somewhere in the conversation, I have to ask for a contract. It took me many years to realize I'm not in the banking business. So, if you think we're getting along well, and you have $1,000 to spend, sign here on the drawing that you like it and give me $500. That way, my liability is less on the back side. And any job over $10,000, we change the contract so it's half, quarter, quarter. At the end of the day, my family and my staff are not liable for $5,000, only $2,500."

Accounts receivables are scary, he said.

"People you think will pay you and can afford to pay you don't pay you, and you're 90 days out, 120 days out," Sparky said. "And even with all these protections, sometimes we still get screwed. But not enough to put us out of business."

Learning to please clients was also a problem. For example, early on a friend asked Sparky to build her a small end table. Her instructions? "Be as creative as you can."

"She said, 'I know I'm going to like it,'" Sparky said. "But she hated it. I still have that table. I didn't realize then that we're in the custom-work business, not the I-like business. When a person wants me to make something, they really mean I have to listen to what their needs are. I might be able to have a little bit of me in it, but it's mostly them. That was an expensive but deep lesson. I don't think I've made that mistake many times since. We're in the business of solving other people's problems. Although it's a fun line of thought – where can I add to this piece so it becomes a true Wood & Wood icon? – most of the credit has to belong to the client."

That has been his MO ever since. Pennie Beach, the owner of the Basin Harbor Club on Lake Champlain, said she expected signs and instead became part of "an eye-opening" process.

"Sparky came down and did a complete walkthrough of our property," Beach said. "He got the flavor of the place. He was very insightful about how we might need to guide people and what signs would speak for us. He really 'got it' that we've been here for over 100 years, and it's not like we want to have neon and flashy stuff. He came up with designs that were organic and worked well with what we've got. The craftsmanship is really wonderful. Dealing with him overall was wonderful. It's wonderful having great people here in Vermont. We don't have to leave the state."

Different companies require different styles. Vermont National Bank needed a different kind of signage than Ben & Jerry's.

"Vermont National Bank's sign was a carving with strong graphics," Sparky said. "We got the logo and took over from there. Ben & Jerry's has been a great client of ours. We were lucky enough to hit them when everything they were doing was in two dimensions. We took them into three-dimensional art – kind of Alice-in-Wonderland, oversized. We did all the storefronts around the country for 15 years. We're still doing work at the factory tour in Waterbury. They've been one of our best clients."

The state has given Wood & Wood many contracts.

"They've been judicious about using sign companies," Sparky said. “They'll put a project out to bid, but they'll spread the contracts around. So over the years we've done a lot of work for them. We did the signs for the fish hatchery up in the islands. We've done all the work at the Waterbury facility. These are not romantic signs but they are good contracts. We've done some work for the Rutland state buildings, inside and outside. That's how the state has helped us out."

Wood & Wood has done award-winning designs for Vermont companies like Stowe Mountain, Haystack, Coffee Enterprises, plus a host of national companies. In 2008, it won First Place Specialty Woodwork Category, Interior ID Signs, for its work for American Girl's Chicago and New York stores.

Besides attention-getting interpretive signs, it specializes in "wayfinding."

"Let's say you're approaching a hospital," Sparky said. "Think of the number of signs you have to see before you get into the hospital. Or think of the Woodstock Inn. The wayfinding piece is how to get in. Then you have to be treated kindly at the front door so you want to go in the door. That's the whole aesthetic thing. Then you have to find your way through the building to your room without getting pissed off. That's one of my key phrases: I will assist people in keeping people from getting pissed off."

Wood & Wood signs have been recognized by about 60 national and international industry awards and appear in a host of glossy books and magazines.

Pottersville

Out of their love for wood and design and their desire for a home, in the mid-Seventies Peggy and Sparky began building a compound of buildings to live and work in. "Pottersville" has since been featured in several arts magazines.

"First we built a small shop in the hills," Sparky said. "Out of that we built the doors and windows for our house as well as the signs. As we started getting busy, I built another shop on the same property. Now there are four buildings on the property – three shop buildings and a home. I didn't know how to do it when I started. I built some post and beam for the signs and figured that's what I needed to know. Me and Peg, we hired a friend who had already built one house. We had a couple of friends who were clients and also architects. We did some drawings and showed them to them and they made suggestions. Then we just started, and it was a ball. We've spent the last 20 years redoing the stuff we did wrong."

American Style Magazine described Pottersville this way: "On the outside, the structures have a common Tudor style – that drippy, thatched-roofed look of Old World architecture with heavy doors etched with carvings of fairies and wizards. Inside, an eclectic array of styles reflects the organic manner in which the Potter family thrives."

The current Wood & Wood office and shop is located on Route 100, down below Pottersville. Part of it was brought down from Pottersville.

"We built this building five years ago as an extension of our buildings up there," Sparky said. "We are builders now. We design a lot of buildings and storefronts. The sign trade is how we get our foot in the door, and once people know us and what we're capable of, we can do anything custom. I've designed several houses for friends. It's liberating. As a designer, no one is putting any restraints on you."

Dream On

Signs took a second place to fun when, in 1976, Sparky, Peggy and some friends began Dream On Productions and started producing a multimedia/music show that was a direct descendent of rock light shows and a precursor of music videos.

"We would take photos and mix the slides to music and do these heavy dissolves," Sparky said. "It started because one of my good friends, Charlie Brown, owned an infamous night spot in the valley for 30 years. He was a camera buff and he would put on slide shows in the winter while people were drinking beer. It got really popular. He invited my wife and I and another friend to start a company that was hell-bent on becoming an entertainment group."

Business grew rapidly.

"A lot of people come to the valley, and they would see these slide shows getting better and better every month," Sparky said. "So they said, 'I'd better hire you to do some work in New York City,' or Bermuda or Martha's Vineyard. So we got a lot of high-end exposure doing multimedia. We became an hour and a half, two-hour act, almost like a band. We'd go in with our 10-foot screens and big speakers and a plethora of slide shows on any kind of subject matter – sports, romance, comedy, pretty much anything you can imagine. For 10 years that was a pretty interesting part of our life. By day I'd do stationery art, static art, signs. By night, we did slideshow entertainment."

Peggy was a partner in Dream On.

"I was the music editor and coordinated the scripts and did some of the photography," Peggy said. "But mostly I did logistics. I organized models and coordinated with ad agencies and figured out locations for shoots. That was so much fun. Dream On took us all over the world. And we didn't have children, so it was like being paid to do something that was more fun than you could ever imagine."

Dream On's highlight was the 1980 Winter Olympics. First, Coca Cola hired Wood & Wood to do multiple signs at Lake Placid. Then ski companies hired Dream On to do their entertainment.

"We did photographs of whatever daily events we could, so by the time the day was over, we had developed the film and could show the pictures with a pre-finished music track at night," Sparky said. "Every day we had a new set of slides. We had the only current pictures. Our slideshow was very hockey-oriented. So for two weeks after the Olympics, we had the only finished show about the Olympics. We were hired to travel with the hockey team around the country, showing the slide show."

Eventually, Sparky had to stop working for Dream On and concentrate on signs. Peggy continued alone for a few years.

"I ended up buying Dream On and running it myself until Grace was a year old," Peggy said. "Then it became unwieldy to travel so much. When we closed the company, we always thought we would go back to it some day. To this day, people ask us to do little things in that department and we sometimes do. It follows us around like a big dinosaur. We have closets full of slides and equipment."

Bowls

After Peggy stopped Dream On, she stayed at home and taught piano.

"That's when Grace started playing the piano," Peggy said. "She wasn't my student. She was naturally so musical that she would watch and try to stay one step ahead of whoever my best student was."

Teaching piano proved to be expensive.

"Our house was so much fun that the kids would never leave," Peggy said. "They would come early, eat, do cartwheels in the living room, have their lesson, do their homework and wait for their parents to come and get them. By the time I figured out all the food that got eaten and the messes that got made, I gave it up. So I only taught for six or seven years. Then I started doing the bowls."

The bowls are hand-crafted from Vermont hard maple and hand-painted in a Pottersville workshop. Then they are sealed with a food-safe finish. They have been especially treasured as wedding gifts and have been sold all over the US, plus Italy, Switzerland, and Japan. Ranging in price from $90 to $200, they were featured in New York Magazine, Bon Appetit, The Santa Fean, The Southwest Collector's Guide, and Vermont Life Magazine.

The recession was the impetus for the bowls.

"It's what we gave for Christmas presents the year we had no money," Peggy said. "I made some bowls and they ended up in a lot of homes where people saw them and wanted one. Before you knew it, the bowls were overtaking the piano. So I found a replacement piano teacher to cover me and by 1993, I had a bona fide business, with a production facility, employees and 30 different gallery accounts around the country, plus in Europe and Japan."

In 1997, Peggy co-founded the Artisan's Gallery in Waitsfield, a cooperative that today represent 180 Vermont artists. Even though she is now winding down the bowl business – her main supplier has closed – she intends to remain connected to the cooperative.

"As long as I have remaining bowls to sell, I'll be involved," she said. "Then I'm hoping to experiment with a different art form so I can continue to be involved."

In the meantime, the techniques Peg developed to paint bowls are being used by Wood & Wood to paint furniture that can often be found at Artisan's Gallery.

The Kids

The three Potter children have followed in their parents' creative – and entrepreneurial – footsteps.

"There's something about growing up in such a creative family," Grace said. "One of the big things I remember as a kid is there was never an idle moment. It was not about, 'Put the kids in front of the TV and make them veg out.' We always needed to be doing something else, too. Painting something, writing, doing homework. I was raised to be a multitasker."

Charlotte, the oldest, grew up hanging around Sparky's shop. She started making and selling glass earrings when she was still in high school. She took a BA in Fine Arts from Alfred University with a concentration in glass and a minor in dance.

"I went up and jumped into her courses with her," Sparky said.

Charlotte has already had several gallery shows and just completed a Master of Fine Arts degree at the Rhode Island School of Design with a specialty in glassblowing. She will soon be teaching at the Haystack Mountain School in Deer Isle, Maine, and in the fall she has a fellowship at the Pilchuck Glass School near Seattle.

According to Sparky, Charlotte has found a way to combine glass blowing and dance.

"She chose glassblowing because it's physical," Sparky said. "She's a dancer and likes to move her body around. If you watch female glassblowers, they dance their way through glass blowing. Women are sort of taking over the glassblowing world. Charlotte is a more dedicated artist than Peg and I. We're scratching the surface and she's deep into it. She's also a rugged skier and an amazing person."

"And I'm sure, whatever she does, she'll be in business for herself," Peggy said.

Grace learned early on that she does "not have the panache" for the business end of business.

"Basically, my big goal was to try and have a company where I wouldn't run the business side," Grace said. "I knew from day one I had to have the kind of company where I could hire someone to do that. I was more about the vision and the artistic side of it."

Being a Potter helped Grace with one valuable aspect of the music business: she learned how to do publicity.

"I learned how to run Photoshop, how to do press releases, press packets, CDs, how to publicize different events," Grace said. "I learned how to present things in a way that made them look more professional than they really were. I could scoot out down the hill and work with my dad's graphic team. I learned how to make signs and do graphics. All the tools were there for me to work with."

The youngest child, Lee, who lives in Pottersville, has wrestled with medical challenges. But he's also a published poet and sometimes a comedian.

"He's a poet and savant," Sparky said. "He's a remarkably cool and talented person and a terrific standup comedian. He can do Jeff Foxworthy as good as Jeff Foxworthy. He's also one of my best friends. We go out and do a lot of things together. But his art is turning out to be poetry."

Family friend Melinda Moulton of Main Street Landing admires the way the Potters have melded together their family life, their creative interests and their businesses.

"There are three extraordinary children, but when you talk to Sparky about his family, he never singles out Grace or talks about her celebrity," Moulton said. "He always talks about his wife and her work or his other children. He never brags about Grace. I think that says so much about him; it's a quality of humanity that doesn't need to toot that horn. And he could toot that horn. I think that says so much about him and Peggy as parents and about a great internal beauty of them as a family. They're a really cool set of parents and they have cool kids and they have a cool life."

The Future

Every now and then, Peggy and Sparky have been approached by people who want to buy Wood & Wood.

"People come at you, knocking on the door, and you're not sure what they're trying to do," Sparky said. "I was listening to them and thinking, 'Why would I do this? I like what I'm doing, I don't care that much about retiring. We have a great crew. Why would I do that? What would be next?' So Peg and I thought about it for a minute and said we're not going to answer those calls. I would love it if I ran into somebody who wanted to continue what we're doing – someone on the staff or a family member. But we've never put an ad out, and our kids are all evincing other interests."

Now that the kids have left home, Peggy is looking for her next career, possibly in real estate and home renovation. Sparky plans to take Wood & Wood further into the digital world.

"We've recently purchased an expensive digital printing machine to take our art and have it go out to the public in a less expensive and more competitive way," Sparky said. "In these times, people are looking for a way to save some money. So we have a way to print on vinyl and then laminate a design onto a board. Now we're investing deeper into that piece of it. But our product – hopefully – is still known more for our ability to design. The growth part of our business is design."

These days, Sparky spends most of his days filling the blank pages of black books with sketches.

"This is the beginning of the business – meeting the clients and being able to draw for them," he said. "It all starts with little pencil sketches that I can do quickly because people have short attention spans. Then we'll take these sketches and elevate them into hand drawings. Hand drawings are more romantic than computer drawings, and you have to keep the romance in the project. We don't go to the computer until we know what we're going to build. Then we do working drawings. I don't know if anyone else does it this way, but this is how Wood & Wood does it."

After 38 years, the process has come close to being perfected.

"We don't make too many mistakes," Sparky said. "Our gross is getting bigger because we're getting better as designers. The way to stay alive is to not put all our eggs in one basket. We market to many industries."

Wood & Wood designs are easy to market nationally.

"We do the design, and then for the fabrication and installation pieces, we often partner with construction companies and sign shops in other places," Sparky said.

Aggressive target marketing is a big part of what they do.

"We don't wait around," Sparky said. "We go after ski resorts. We like working with medical facilities. Retirement homes are great. We like places that need a sign system. We like to figure out what the person's need is and send them specific images. If there's a resort that's going to have a restaurant, we send them samples of what we can do. We try to be the early worm, before the thing is out of the ground. We try to be proactive about the next amount of work we're going to get. We've survived by our hustle, and that's how I think we're going to continue to survive."
Joyce Marcel is a freelance writer and author from Dummerston. Her new book, a collection of her columns called, "A Thousand Words or Less," is now available. Learn more about her and how to order the book at her Web site: www.joycemarcel.com.