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Meet the Artist: Jo Johnson

A Business Comes Out of the Woods

Measuring the growth of JO Johnson’s business – “Wood You Tell Me” – is like counting the rings of a tree. Each ring represents a challenge met and turned into a small victory. As the tree grows, so grows the company – and its success.

The seed for “Wood You Tell Me” was actually planted when JO was still dating her husband-to-be, Jeff, and they encountered a marquetry exhibit at a Minneapolis-area mall. It was JO’s first encounter with marquetry, and as she says, “it was love at first sight.”

Like many an infatuation, JO went into it with everything: She bought books. She purchased a saw. She stocked up on beautiful woods. She took a class. Laughingly, she says, “I failed miserably.”

A year later and now married, JO discovered she still had a fair amount of wood left over. She wanted to make a special gift for her husband. She woodburned a poem she had written, and decided to turn it into a card. She put some tiny brass hinges on it, which didn’t work out quite as she had hoped, but was good enough for the short-term.

The growth of an idea…

The card may not have lasted, but the idea that she was "onto something"spurred JO to mention it to a friend in the local Chamber of Commerce. He agreed, and thought she should pursue the idea. "I went crazy,"says JO"I bought every species of veneer I could find."

The first challenge was to find a way to impose artwork and poems onto the wood. She eventually found a local printer who was able to handle that piece of it. She got a "nice, clean image," but was limited to just one or two colors. She still had the problem of how to bind the two pieces of wood. Having found out that hinges were less than successful, she started the search for a better method.

"It's funny, but when you have a challenge, you're always looking for answers. Your antennae are up. One day, I stumbled onto a brochure and found that they used padding compound to hold it together. Anyway, I called the place and they actually showed me how they did it."

Now that she had conquered some of her technical problems, she could start experimenting with the kind of art she wanted and decided on Western and wildlife motifs.

Growing pains…

JO was ready to take her show on the road. Her product was unique, and there was no competition – but she soon found out that the purchasing public, though they loved the product, was wary of it. Could you mail it? Would it break?
Making the cards was both labor-intensive and costly. In short, too much so for the price the cards could fetch. In the meantime, she had landed her first real client who bought both note cards and business cards – meaning that JO was now doing both wholesale and custom orders simultaneously.

She was also experimenting with other ideas (such as bookmarks, of which she “sold a ton”) and the use of different species of woods. She finally settled on maple because of its light color, which made it more conducive to accepting the colors that were being printed. In the meantime, the perceived problems with her products continued to plague her. It hit home when, at a show in 1995, dozens of people stopped by to admire her wares – but she didn’t make a single sale.

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