Thirty Years of Shaker Box Work: What's Changed

If you've followed my work for a while, you've likely seen the world around small handcraft businesses change quite a bit. I have too — thirty-three years of it now, from a small shop here in Embden, Maine. Some of the changes have been dramatic, and some I didn't even notice until years after they'd happened. Here's how it all looks from my end.

When the Shows Started to Leave

In 1993, when I started, you sold handcraft at shows — that was about it, and there really wasn't another option.

My parents had done it with the furniture they built: pack the truck Friday, drive to a show in Connecticut or western Massachusetts, set up a booth Saturday morning, talk to people for two or three days, pack up whatever didn't sell, and drive home. I followed the same circuit, so I knew how it worked.

Me at a show booth in the mid-1990s, next to a stack of boxes taller than I was.

For a long stretch, retail and wholesale shows were where the work happened — the Northern New England Products Trade Show in Portland (that one's still going, actually, under the New England Made name these days), the Market Square shows in Pennsylvania, the Country Folk Art Shows before they disappeared, and Old Deerfield in Massachusetts. There was also the Maine Crafts Guild, which has since folded into the Maine Crafts Association after the show side eventually stopped paying for itself.

The booth set up and waiting in space 90 — boxes, carriers, and my parents' cupboards ready for the doors to open.

Honest economics: I never lost money on a show, but sometimes it was close enough that I knew it. Between booth rent, gas, a hotel for two or three nights, meals, and the gamble on outdoor weather, the margins could get thin — so when the online shift finally came, it wasn't just convenient. It was a bit of a relief.

The pre-computer texture of running this kind of business is hard to convey now. I typed customer addresses into a word processor to print labels for show-announcement postcards, and the postage added up fast. I kept the expense and income records in a little brown spiral-bound ledger — which, I'll point out, never crashed once.

An early brochure from the Solon years — back when orders came in by phone and fax.

There were a few catalog companies in that stretch — Yield House up in New Hampshire ordered berry baskets, for instance — and outlets like that put my work in front of households that would never have seen me at a craft show. I appeared on QVC twice, the first time in September of 1996 through the Northern New England Products showcase, selling Size #5 swing-handle carriers on QVC's "Made In Maine" segment. Luckily the carriers sold fast, so I didn't have to be on live TV for long. That same month, Governor Angus King — now a U.S. Senator — had the QVC Maine vendors over to the Blaine House for a reception. None of that was really strategy on my part; I just happened to be in the right place at the right time.

Governor Angus King taking a close look at one of my swing-handle carriers at the Blaine House, September 1996.

The shows didn't leave all at once. They thinned out a little more each year as the organizations behind them wound down and the math stopped working, and some shows that paused during the pandemic never came back. By the time I stepped back from doing shows, most of the makers I knew had already done the same.

The Internet, in Stages

The internet came for small craft businesses in stages. I built my first website close to twenty years ago — informational only, on Weebly, with no e-commerce. I wasn't ready for that yet; I just wanted to be findable.

It was years before I sold anything online. First it was Etsy, which turned out to be the training wheels — for me, for a lot of other craftspeople, and for our customers, who were all getting comfortable with the idea of buying a handmade thing on the internet, sight unseen. Eventually I moved to my own Shopify store, which is where the business runs now.

The shipping workflow alone tells a lot of the story. In the show years I barely shipped anything — the work rode to the show in the truck, and whatever didn't sell rode home the same way. When wholesale accounts started ordering, I didn't even have a way to print postage; the UPS driver would show up at the shop with the labels. Now the customer types their own address at checkout, it flows straight to the shipping software, the postage prints itself, and the carrier picks the box up at the end of the driveway. It's the same one-person shop, but a completely different week.

I was fortunate when the pandemic came — the business was already fully online by then, so it didn't affect me the way it did a lot of makers. People who wanted to buy from a small Maine workshop could still find me, the makers I knew who still depended on in-person shows had it much harder.

That's the quiet, sad part of this. A lot of traditional craftspeople I knew didn't make the switch — some couldn't, since if your work is furniture-sized, shipping it across the country isn't a small problem to solve; some wouldn't; and some just didn't have the help. I read recently about a longtime woodworking supplier in Florida that finally closed after more than two centuries. They'd been around since 1812 and once made the desks the U.S. Senate sat at after Washington burned, and the owner described running the place lately as trying to make a dollar out of fifteen cents. That's the pattern.

Being Visible

One of the most useful things I figured out about the online shift had nothing to do with Shopify settings — it had to do with being visible.

Many makers won't put themselves in their own marketing. They'll photograph the work and photograph the workshop, but they won't get in the frame, and I think that's a mistake. If you're buying something handcrafted, you want to know who made it — you want to see them.

People who message me almost always start with my name: "Rob, the box arrived." By the time someone orders, they've usually seen the workshop, the process, and me at the bench with sawdust on my shirt — so we're not strangers, even if we've never met. That's a real thing the internet can do for a small shop, and I think it's underused.

What the Online Shift Cost

The shift wasn't pure gain. I miss the in-person conversations — there's a quality to talking with someone who's actually holding a box that doesn't have a direct equivalent in a comment thread. Social media offsets some of that, but not all of it.

A few things I used to make I don't anymore, because shipping has gotten too expensive — coffee-table-sized boxes, some of the larger carriers, pet beds, and berry baskets that shaped what I built in the 90s and now don't really fit. The move online narrowed what's economically realistic to make. I think the trade is right for what I'm doing now, but it is a trade.

A page from the old brochure: berry baskets, even a pet bed — some of the work that didn't survive the move online.

The Buyers Who Were Never Mine to Lose

There's a familiar narrative about cheap imports flooding the handcraft market — Amazon, Wayfair, Temu, things labeled "Shaker-style" that come out of a factory. It's true, but it's also mostly irrelevant.

The person picking up a factory-made box at a discount retailer was never my customer in the first place. The customer who finds my work is looking for something specific — a piece made by a person they can call by name, in a workshop they could in theory drive to.

What that customer values is the way the products have been made for thirty-three years: local lumber, milled on-site; traditional construction — swallowtail joints, copper tacks, milk paint, tung oil; finishes that improve with age; small batches, listed when finished and packed by one set of hands. They're slow ways of working, every one of them, and they're the reason the work is what it is.

The milling decision was the foundational one. When I started, I was buying my band stock from John Wilson — the man who'd taught the class I took at Sabbathday Lake — out of his Home Shop in Michigan. That worked for a stretch, but the finances didn't, and I knew I either had to figure out my own lumber or stay dependent on someone else's. So I found a local sawyer to mill logs for me, and a family member in the woods business keeps an eye out for good ones — over the years I've learned exactly what I'm looking for in a log. That single decision, made when I was still figuring out whether this was a real business, is what makes everything since possible.

Buying pre-milled stock or pre-cut bands would have been the simpler road, but I wanted the quality of the material in my own hands, start to finish — it's the part everything else depends on.

AI, and What It Actually Is

AI is the freshest thing on the landscape, and the one I'm least certain about.

If the internet years taught me anything, it's that ignoring a new technology isn't a good path — it's worth at least exploring, to see whether it can do something for you and your customers. So I'm not anti-AI. I use it — though not in the shop, of course. There's no AI involved in milling a board, cutting a swallowtail joint, or fitting a top into a band, and AI can't bend a maple band over a form. But for everything around the shop, yes: thinking out loud about pricing decisions, working through writing, looking at problems from angles I wouldn't have considered ten years ago. AI is a tool, and like any tool, it amplifies whatever the person holding it is bringing to the job.

Someone else is using the same tool to flood Facebook with AI-generated pictures of "handmade" boxes that don't exist — same tool, very different intentions.

That gets at what I actually worry about with AI, which isn't replacement — it's noise. The volume of AI-generated content on social media, in search results, and across product listings could get bad enough that real makers' real work gets buried under the slop, and buyers eventually tune all of it out, including the work that's real. That's a genuine risk for every small maker, and I don't have a clean answer to it.

What I keep coming back to is that buyers who want the real thing will keep finding the real thing, and part of why I write posts like this is to make sure there's something real for them to find. A person curious about how a Shaker box gets made, or wondering whether anyone still does this kind of work the long way, is reading something a real person wrote. That doesn't solve the broader problem, but it pushes back on it in one small place.

Etsy, where a lot of independent makers ended up, is in its own turmoil over exactly this. The CEO in 2024 told the press that "you couldn't run Etsy without AI," and active buyer numbers fell in 2025 — a marketplace built around "there's a person behind every piece" is now AI-dependent infrastructure. I don't have a clean prediction for where that lands, but I do have a strong opinion that the right response, for a small maker, is to be more clearly yourself, not less.

What's Still Here

Thirty-three years on, the things that have stayed the same are the substantive ones. The maple comes off the mill the same way it did in 1993, and the bands bend the same way over the same forms. The copper tacks are the same copper tacks — I have a thirty-year supply because the man who used to make them is gone, and I needed to know I wouldn't run out. The swallowtail joints are cut the way they were cut at Sabbathday Lake more than two hundred years ago. A box from this shop in 2026 is, in the ways that matter, the same kind of object as a box from this shop in the 90s.

What's changed is everything around the box — how customers find me, how I interact with them, which channels exist and which have left, and what I have to be good at on top of being a craftsman to keep a small business running in today's marketplace. None of that touches the box itself, which is the part I most wanted to protect.

There's a customer who's been buying from me for thirty years now. She has a daughter who buys her gifts from my work these days — two generations of one family across one box-maker's career. That's the part of the work that has nothing to do with channels.

If you've watched the world around small craft businesses change in your own corner of it, I'd be curious to hear what you've seen. Feel free to reach out through my contact page or email me at robert@lehays.com. I'm always glad to talk about the work.

Since 1993, LeHay's Shaker Boxes has been handcrafting traditional Shaker oval boxes here in Embden, Maine — from locally milled maple and pine, one box at a time.