When Joseph Brody was building wooden beehives as a Peace Corps volunteer in West Africa after college, he couldn’t have predicted how that early-2000s experience would influence the course of his life years later.
In 2016, the Contra Costa County husband and father left his corporate job at Restoration Hardware to go to a master craftsman’s school in Maine and learn to make furniture. He returned to the Bay Area to launch JBrody & Co, his own custom woodworking business, out of his Walnut Creek garage.
Brody has since moved to a larger workshop in an industrial space in Concord while gaining a national following for making smaller items — beautiful, hand-crafted walnut-wood bowls, trays, spoons and other utensils for cooking and serving food. He’s a regular at craft fairs in the Bay Area and beyond, and his pieces are sold in more than 500 independent stores around the country, including museum gift shops at the De Young and Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco.
Brody’s designs are valued for their simplicity and quality. The attention he pays to each spoon or spatula comes through in every part of his process, including one that originates from learning to build those beehives in the Republic of Gambia. He makes sure each piece leaves with a finish he has mixed himself, using wax from home beehives. He also uses wax that comes from hives belonging to friends he’s met through the Mount Diablo Beekeepers Association.
“You take that wax and melt that down in a double boiler with walnut oil and coconut oil, and then you can make a nice finish,” he says.
The non-toxic finish seals off pores in the wood, protects it from damage and deepens its natural, rich color.
Using his own wax serves other purposes, as well. It helps reduce waste and is part of his emphasis on using as many locally sourced materials as possible. He believes that craftsmanship is a fundamentally human endeavor that supports community and sees the modern woodworker’s role as akin to the village carpenter 200 years ago. “Someone would come to me and say, ‘Make me a table, make me a spoon,’” he says. “You’re working directly with local materials and with local people. There’s an immediacy to it.”
Brody’s journey as a woodworker actually began much sooner than Africa. Raised in Connecticut, he learned the “magic of creation,” as he says, during boyhood visits with his grandfather, who lived in Indiana. His grandfather had a day job as a mechanical engineer for General Motors but was a woodworker in his free time. He encouraged Brody to build things: a playhouse, for instance, or shelves for the garage.
“It was always kind of magical to spend time with him and it just opened my eyes to (the idea that) if you need something you can just make it, you don’t need to go buy everything.”
But growing up, woodworking was considered “blue-collar,” and a college-bound Brody couldn’t imagine it being a future livelihood. Always interested in seeing the world and serving other people, he studied Mandarin and international affairs at the University of Puget Sound, then volunteered for the Peace Corps.
After his time in Africa, he briefly worked for a textile importer in New York, then spent 10 years living and working in China in product development and manufacturing. That’s where he met his wife, Helen. A job at Restoration Hardware’s corporate headquarters in Marin County allowed the two of them to move back to the United States and start a family.
But sitting in an office all day and helping to develop the furniture and other products being sold didn’t satisfy his growing desire “to be the one making the things.” But he worried about his responsibilities.
“You know, our daughter was 2 years old, we had a mortgage and all this kind of stuff,” he says.
Then one night in bed, Brody was reading a memoir by Peter Korn, a master craftsman, furniture maker and founder of the Maine-based Center for Furniture Craftsmanship. The book explains why craftsmanship can be deeply fulfilling. As Korn said, working with one’s hands to build even a cabinet door — choosing the materials, directly using the tools and striving for quality — can be a way to design “a vision of the good life.”
Brody recalls his wife urging him to “just do it.”
“She was like, ‘Don’t be lying in bed in 10 years and be like, ‘Oh, I should’ve done this, I should’ve done that,’” he says.
Together, they took what he describes as a “leap,” with the family moving to Maine for nine months so he could study at Korn’s school. Returning to Walnut Creek, Brody’s Restoration Hardware contacts helped him get commercial furniture-making commissions, including building a 27-foot-long conference table for an office at the top of Salesforce tower in San Francisco.
But a lot of Brody’s commercial work dried up during the pandemic, when companies stopped opening new offices. So, he switched to making smaller things, like his spoons. He learned to refine his process so that he could hand-produce them in greater quantities, and he quickly learned how to get his products noticed at fairs and in larger trade shows.
Moving into his 2,500-square-foot workshop off Highway 4 about five years ago gave Brody the space for industrial-sized saws and lathes to produce up to 10,000 pieces a year. He still builds chairs, tables and bar stools for commercial clients, some of which are on display in a small showroom next to his workshop.
Even with the machines, a lot of his own handiwork goes into producing each piece. Using a band saw, Brody will cut out each spoon, one by one, from a block of wood and use the drill press to hollow out the bowl of each spoon.
“Yeah, it’s labor intensive,” he says. “You have to do a lot, and be fast. People who have a hobby of carving spoons may be able to do more by hand, but to make a living you have to be thinking about every single part of the process and how you can be more efficient.”
To keep the income steady, Brody works seven days a week, and he puts in time at craft fairs pretty much every weekend. But going to the fairs has become one of the most gratifying parts of being a craftsman, he says — having that human connection to his customers, like the village carpenter of 200 years ago.
For one thing, he gets valuable feedback, such as hearing that people want a curved spoon for wok cooking. But more than that, he gets to meet people who actually use what he makes.