The Deep Cut Origin Story: How Crouching and a Bad Dog Led to Handmade Home Goods

November 12, 2020

The Deep Cut Origin Story: How Crouching and a Bad Dog Led to Handmade Home Goods

Allow us to introduce ourselves. We are Deep Cut. We are here to provide high-quality household products that help people get more enjoyment from their homes. We have started with handmade, wall-mounted open-cube shelves designed for vinyl records, but that offer many other uses.

You may be wondering how and why we got here. If you aren’t, skip down about two paragraphs. We are two brothers and a cousin: Rich, Clark, and Rob. We all have record collections, and we all had mediocre storage. For one thing, we were all keeping our records in shelves pretty close to the floor. It was slightly annoying to pick out a record. We had to kneel or sit on the floor to browse. Then Rich’s 6-month-old puppy chewed up a few records, and that was that. It was time to get the records off the floor.

Flat packing.jpg

Rich thought finding a fix to the situation would be no big deal. He wanted something with a clean design, but with high-quality materials. His collection was a show-piece. He wanted nicer than IKEA. He checked some big furniture stores, but found nothing at eye-level. He found a few boutique online shops building vinyl storage consoles or shelves, but they were expensive ($1000+). And they had limited space, so they would not scale if his collection grew. So he got a carpenter to build some custom shelves. It took months and months. He thought: it should not be this hard. It should not take this long. It should not require this many compromises.

Deep Cut - Wood supply for handmade shelves

Rich called his cousin Rob. Rob is a contractor and a woodworker. Rich told Rob about his search. “Am I crazy? This seems like something you could make.” The two talked. They talked mid-century modern, minimalist design. They talked hardwoods and color palettes. They talked size, capacity, and scalability with options to grow. They talked wall-mounting that would be easy for less-than-skilled with strength to handle substantial weight. Rob said, “Let me see what I can do.”

After many iterations, they landed on a design: the original Deep Cut shelves. They are easily wall-mountable and hold about 50-60 records each. The design-forward French Cleat system can be installed on just about any type of wall surface by just about anyone. They are made from the highest grade of hardwood-veneered plywood, starting with walnut and maple. They have attractive yet practical design flourishes like hardware-free miter-fold joints and a continuous wrapped wood grain pattern around the top corners. They are designed to look great alone for small record (or book or other) collections, or in groups of two or more as collections expand.

We were excited and humbled to complete a successful Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign in October of 2018 (thank you so much to the friends, family, and randos who supported us). Our online store will be opening shortly after this blog is published. So look out.

More than that, we are excited to be joining the vinyl and home design community as contributors. We plan to introduce new products and pieces over the next months and years that will help people enjoy their homes. We will build interesting pieces that look great. We will build quality products that are made by hand. We will balance the practical, attractive, and fun to use. If that sounds good to you, welcome in the Deep Cut family.

Until then,

Deep Cut





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