So, a few years ago I started this little side hustle. It’s a leather goods hobby that occasionally makes a little bit of money. I called it “Last Chance Customs” (LCC) because at the time I thought of it as my “last chance” to make something of myself and provide for my family. Dark thoughts followed the contemplation of its possible failure.
It started as a practical response to the end of my moving company. MTB had become a million-dollar-generating behemoth, but still had all the problems of a sole proprietorship. Payroll alone pushed the half-million mark, and by the end of it I was breathalyzing drivers on job sites. Customers were offended if I charged rates that wouldn’t even cover the cost of doing their jobs. I kept trying to make it up on volume, which too often meant trying to multiply by zero.
When the business finally crashed, I had learned my lessons about carrying massive overhead. The idea that I could support my family, solo, with a craft, had massive appeal.
If nothing else, I’d bet that it would be enough to generate enough income to experiment with paid advertising for the homeschool consulting business my wife and I were building together at the time.
Here’s what surprised me: I loved the craft. I wasn’t, and still am not, all that great at it, but it became a near-obsession.Why? It produced things. Actual things you could hold in your hand. Attention-getting things. Things that were useful!
When I ran the moving company, I didn’t have anything to show for a hard day’s work. Or even a hard year’s work. I’d have record years, year after year, and then some insurance company would come along with an audit and say we hadn’t been paying enough on our workman’s comp policy. They’d just go ahead and deduct that $80,000 summer windfall, thank-you-very-much.
But even when we had something left over for the winter, I couldn’t drive down the street and point to things I’d done. My dad would do that with us back when we were kids. He was a builder. I’d guess that maybe 15 percent of the homes built in Clark County, Washington back in the 80s were his creations. We’d be riding along beside him and he’d point and say, “I built that.”
Not so with moving. And later, when I tried so hard to get into marketing, everything I did - every ad, every page of copy, every graphic - was just an ephemeral blip on the metasphere. At best, it would get somebody to “consume” something they didn’t need.
When I made a leather notebook, it was something beautiful that somebody could use and love. It might even outlast the client.
Art comes from the hands, not the soul
Throughout the process of conceiving and building LCC, David James Duncan’s “The Brothers K” was top of mind. It’s about politics, religion, family and baseball…sort of. It’s more about the complicated love and ties among family members during a time of great cultural upheaval in America.
In the novel, one of the brothers is drafted and goes to Vietnam. He’s the gentle brother, the life-loving, almost simple young man of faith. But in the jungle, he’s required to do horrible things which annihilate his good nature. Back home, his family tries to bring him back to life, but it’s a long road.
Eventually, for reasons that even he can’t explain, he starts making iron wood stoves. The family has no connection to manufacturing, and certainly not wood stove production. But his hands go to work. He fails. He tries again. He fails again. And eventually, he finds some healing - and success - with the life-giving fruit of his labors.
Scads of words have been written about creation, the creative process, etc. It’s such an overworked trope that so many - most, undoubtedly - people think the barrier to entry to creative work is easily overcome. Take a look at any season of “Whatever’s Got Talent,” or “American Idol.” There’s something about the creative impulse that fools fools into believing the very act of creation is, a priori, in and of itself, brilliant. Art comes from the magnificence of ME, ME, ME!
It’s merde, of course.
This became real whenever I tried to manifest the vision for a notebook in my head using the material in my hands. The vision was the most brilliant thing ever to come from a human mind. The reality was an abomination. Or, I’d get something about 99 percent of the way there, and with the slip of an awl or edge beveler, turn $20 worth of leather into $0 worth of scrap material.
I have a rather enormous box of “lessons” in my workshop…
LCC forced me to go deeper. Slower. More deliberately and methodically. I wasn’t just learning skills, I was incorporating discipline and virtue into my character. The work got better not through some sort of divine artistic frenzy, but the grunt work.
Perhaps most importantly, it forced me to combat identification with the work. A creative person should never identify his or her being with the art being produced - we are human beings first, not writers, painters, designers, etc. A creative has to learn how to separate the self from the work, then craft and produce objectively. To draw forth from the Void and arrange things in truth. The artist isn’t the Muse - he’s more like middle management.
LCC became the laboratory for everything I’m getting at with this blog: Determination. Perseverance. Humility. The good kind of obstinacy. I dusted off all of those virtues - long unused and dormant during the final, hopeless days of MTB - and intentionally deployed them for the new endeavor.
What’s next?
I’m still trying to figure out where it “fits,” though. I love the work and can certainly appreciate its potential as a revenue stream, but to scale it up to income-replacement levels, I would almost certainly have to quit my day job. Other people have done it, but that risk is well beyond anything I or my wife are willing to take right now.
Recent “unpleasantness” almost completely destroyed the momentum of the leatherwork side hustle. If you go searching for the website, you’ll get a 404 Error - Side Hustle Not Found. It’s OK - I hated that website anyway. I’m not yet sure what LCC 2.0 will look like, but I know it needs to be selling ASAP or I’ll be doomed to take on more overtime work in a Tulsa bank’s call center, which is just as bad as it sounds.
This is an exceedingly lame way to end this post, but I guess I’ll just have to figure it out. Because I have to.
Hmm…
When you get LCC up and running please let us know.
For what it’s worth, a wise man once told me that everything we produce should have at least one imperfection, even if minuscule, to remind us we are not God. Only God does everything perfectly.
Thank you for sharing your wisdom.
You do beautiful work, Chris! I'm glad you're still doing it.