Today we’d like to introduce you to Peter Oren.
Hi Peter, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
Before the pandemic I had a little music career as a singer-songwriter—a song with over 20 million streams on Spotify, international touring, an indie label deal, and a pitchfork-reviewed album.
I released an album in April 2020 and couldn’t tour to support it. An already challenging career felt impossible. I redirected my attention to developing other skills: woodworking and coding. I had access to the lumber stash I had helped my dad accumulate over the years milling logs as well as his hobbyist workshop, so I built myself some clumsy furniture.
I also began working on a music streaming app to pay higher royalties than Spotify because the pay from so many streams seemed far too little. That is a project that continues as Tuneswell.
As I built furniture, I sought a purposeful business, something that would make the world better in some small way. I had worked for a luthier, milling tone wood for guitar builders, and I knew that he was burning a lot of wood that wasn’t marketable. He bought logs from Maine, which were shipped all the way to Indiana just for a large portion of that wood to be burned. It seemed unsustainable, so I endeavored to make use of that wood. Specifically, the pieces were spruce bookmatched boards approximately 1/4” thick or less intended to be used as acoustic guitar tops.
I experimented with this material, laminating the thin pieces into bigger boards for furniture and made a chair to test the structural use of this material. In doing so, I discovered that the boards I was building with were approximately the size needed to span the arms of the chair as a desk attachment. This began the process of iterating on the design, but in hardwood, which seemed more appropriate than the soft spruce I was trying to use. The second, third, and fourth prototypes experimented with what to do with the tabletop when not in use and how to attach it to the arms elegantly.
I ordered foam, and it arrived in a roll. When it sprung out from its packaging, I realized it was a long enough piece that I could sleep on it. I felt that if I cut out the step of further processing the foam and instead folded it to form the chair cushion, that foam might be used as a sleeping pad.
Meanwhile, as I was building, I worked for periods remodeling houses and stretched my money for others. In September of 2023 that work dried up a little bit, and I knew I needed to get another solid job, but the wildfire smoke making its way down from Canada made me depressed about climate change, and I ignored my financial needs and instead made one final chair prototype. Thereafter, with some stabilizing help from my family, I got a job as a mail carrier and lasted four months before I couldn’t take the 60 hour weeks anymore. I needed energy and time to see my projects through.
In Spring of 2024 I quit my mail job, put my belongings in storage, and set out in my minivan to play short-notice shows in breweries around the Great Lakes, singing Stan Rogers songs, sleeping in the back of my van, showing my chair design around for feedback, and making social media content to promote my music streaming app, Tuneswell. I had scheduled to return to play a music festival in Norway in August 2024, so I wanted a chance to get back into a rhythm of performing in front of people, which had largely been lost since the pandemic.
I made it to the Northeast after spending a good bit of time in Michigan, and in Portland, Maine, I decided to put my chair in a public place for the first time and ask people to sit in it. I started posting these reaction videos to Instagram. When I was in Norway playing the music festival—Parkenfestivalen in Bødo—my first chair video went viral. I had planned to spend the weekend enjoying the festival, and I found myself walking around, drinking beer, making friends, and going viral for something entirely unrelated to my music.
Thereafter, I called home and decided I should return to Indiana to stay with my parents in Columbus to use my dad’s tools and lumber stash to begin producing chairs. I’ve now been here two years, still living at home which is starting to drive me nuts at 34 years old, but my dad bought a woodmizer portable sawmill, so we’ve been cutting lots of lumber, and the resources here are becoming hard to leave. Probably I’m going to trade my minivan in and get a sprinter so I can travel again in a similar capacity for content and networking, but this time with slightly more dignity.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
I’m still working on making sure I’m charging enough. It’s a challenge to start a business with hard costs and sustainable intentions when buyers are accustomed to fast cheap furniture made abroad.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
The patent-pending multifunctional aspect of my design—the tabletop that attaches to the arms of my chair as a desk attachment—is my main thing. I think I’ve come up with an elegant design that will hopefully be useful to people around the world for a long time to come.
Before we let you go, we’ve got to ask if you have any advice for those who are just starting out?
I feel that I’m still just starting out myself. Maybe if there’s a lesson in my story it’s to embrace the occasional need to try something entirely different, even if it means starting over. Additionally, I recommend seeking a simple and concrete problem to solve that is not merely a problem of convenience but instead one of sustainability or justice. I feel that I was rewarded for trying to make use of someone’s waste stream.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://peteroren.com
- Instagram: https://Instagram.com/peterorendesign
- Other: https://open.spotify.com/artist/3F4I37yqRPW4B95eRCHsyA
