GRIFFEN 2024 | 27 From Madison Avenue to Making Paddles Peter Powell (1991) Adman turned woodworker, Peter Powell (1991), talks about making the jump. I first stepped through the doors of an advertisement agency in 1997. Straight away, I felt at home. Before then, I had completed a couple of months training with the Army – fun, but not for me. I had worked on a sheep farm in the Falkland Islands; and I had delivered yachts across the Atlantic – sometimes wildly testing and sometimes quite boring. In fact, it was during one of these lulls in the sailing action when getting a job in advertising first struck me as a good idea. As much as I got out of being at sea, I realised I needed more of a creative outlet. I loved adverts and reasoned there must be a job out there which paid you to dream them up. Fast forward to 2022, I was now one of the Creative Directors of an ad agency called McCann in New York. Although I had lived there for 16 years, I had moved back to the United Kingdom and spent the last four years working remotely. I was struggling with the time difference, the virtual necessity of everything, and never seeing my children. Plus, it does not really matter what you do, after 25 years of doing it, you feel like burning it down. Meanwhile, I had started making canoe paddles in my spare time. The first few were OK, but a long way from being really good. I kept at it – could I make them lighter, prettier, better? I was still working of course, weirdly feeling that I finally knew my subject despite being unhappy. And that is when the two paths came together: making things with my hands gave me a new, deeper satisfaction, while the advertising creative in me knew that when you had the kernel of something, no matter how small or fragile, if you leaned into it, followed it, then you could grow it into something special. This was hardly a business minded way to approach things. I had done zero market research, no analysis of the opportunity. All I knew was that people liked my paddles, so could I start a new career as a canoe paddle-maker? Could I leave the corporate world, unlock its golden handcuffs, and swap it for a life making things in my garage, cooking the meals and doing the school run? Sounded good but the same advertising creative in me also knew that having an idea was the easy bit (you can do that sitting on the toilet). Making it happen was entirely different. I needed a producer. Without my wife none of this would be possible. She supported the change and worked out that if we eliminated X,Y and Z from our lives we could get by on her salary. So, on the 1 March 2022 I left my job and walked into the garage to start my new one. The first thing was to set a deadline. I booked a stall in my village fair that gave me two months to make as many paddles as I could, enough to show people a wide range of shape, size, wood, colour and finish. In fact, this was the first of many shows I entered that first year: the Thames Traditional Boat Festival, the Southampton Boat Show, the Adventure Festival at Mount Edgcumbe. They were all quite a shift from a very comfortable office life with all expenses paid trips to interesting shoot locations, to standing under my little eBay gazebo in a field, hanging onto it during storms to stop it blowing away. At those times I was racked with doubt, what was I doing? Is anyone going to buy anything? Is anyone even going to come to my stall? What happens when the mortgage goes up? But people did come, and they did order paddles. Not millions, but between working on paddle commissions and having the children from 3pm each day, I was busy. The shows were helping to build a little brand awareness, and engaging directly with customers was teaching me a lot about what they liked and how to talk to them about it. Funnily enough, all the lessons I had learnt in advertising about selling work to clients and forging good relationships were just as pertinent in a muddy field as they were in a boardroom of a Fortune 500. Afterall, people are always people. So I tried to listen very carefully, to really hear what they were interested in, to always be willing to work with them or do something a little different, and when the money was on the table, to take it. And by now I had a good bank of photography that I was using on Instagram. Some of it was good enough to attract magazine editors who ran a few articles on me. This kind of thing helped me get in front of interior designers and by now I knew that 80% of my sales were decorative, the actual canoeist market was pretty small. What most people wanted was something beautiful to put in their home. I was starting to zone in on what my brand could be – functional things from the outdoors made beautifully for indoors, in short: Cabin Chic. And with that it opened a whole new line of products. I sourced vintage axe heads and made ash helves (handles) for them. I renovated old trunks. I made bocce sets and what I called ‘tuck boxes’ - boozy field boxes to fit in the boot of a car. And, most recently, table tennis bats. These are fun to use but look great on the wall too. And that is where I am with it all today. I am far poorer, but far happier. I see so much more of my children, but I am still mildly terrified by the mortgage. What I would love to do next is find a good business partner, someone who either has the right customers or has a complementary but different product set. And I would like to apply the look and concept of my brand to something I can mass produce as everything I make is by hand, slowly. And while that is a key component of my brand, it makes it hard to make money! So I still keep my other hand in – I do some freelance advertising creative which, after taking a break, has been lovely coming back to. Fresh, in fact. And, in the hours spent planning and sanding, my thoughts often wander back to the process of making better ads. So I have now got two ‘how to’ seminars on being creative and winning new business. The great irony, of course, is no one needs these seminars more than I!
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