One afternoon in May of 2024, Juniors Elle Beck and Karina Krishnan were making cutting boards for their design class. 

“Last year, Karina made a cutting board and I looked at it and I was like, ‘wow, this is really good’ and I felt like people would buy it,” Beck said. 

They didn’t take the idea of starting a business seriously until their design teacher Brian Hill gave them the support they needed to make it a reality.

“They mentioned it to me a couple times last year,” Hill said. “When it was brought to my attention again this year, we wanted to see if we could actually make it happen.”

Along with Hill and other students in the design class, Beck and Krishnan started a club called ‘BHS Artisanal Woodworking’ which designs and sells handmade wood products and invests the money back in the club.

“It started out as a joke that we could make a bunch of these boards and make a bunch of money,” Beck said. “One day, Mr. Hill [told us that] if we really wanted to make this idea into a reality, we’d have his support.” 

“That really did spark something between Elle and I, and we thought we could really turn this into something,” Krishnan said. “What started as a wild idea has now become a reality.”

Creating this entrepreneurial endeavor seemed to be the easy part, yet Krishnan said it was a long process to get approval from the school to eventually sell the products.

“It took a lot of effort,” Krishnan said, “We had to pitch our idea to the school board and follow official procedures to get approval. [We had to prepare] a pitch and a presentation showing that we are capable of making [the products] out of pure wood scraps that would have been thrown away otherwise.” 

“We also made prototypes of each of the products we were hoping to sell,” she added.

They had a plan to open a stand at Van Aken, but according to Beck, the process of getting approval from the school set them back. 

“It was a week or so away from the Van Aken fair and we had a table scheduled and everything, but the [school district] decided that [we] needed to have more discussions, so we weren’t able to do it,” she said. “It was a little upsetting, but we didn’t let that stop us.”

“There have been quite a few challenges,” Hill said. “Trying to make sure that we do everything within the [school district’s] guidelines was one of our biggest challenges.” 

When the green light was given, Krishnan, Beck and their classmate senior Max Jacobs wasted no time getting started. The first step was to design and make their products.

“Karina, Max and I mainly design the products along with some help from all of our classmates,” Beck said. “We just come up with a design, use some scrap wood that’s in our shop and that’s it. Anything kind of goes. If somebody just has an idea, we can do it.”

“It was easy to know how to make the products because we already have done most of this stuff throughout the curriculum anyway,” Krishnan said.

“We ended up deciding to sell three different size cutting boards—small, medium and large–and we also have bootjacks, which is a special little device made out of wood that can help you take off your shoes,” Beck said. “We also sell custom signs. You can literally engrave anything and a cutting board can turn into so many different things like a welcome sign, a prayer [or] a symbol.” 

“We originally wanted to engrave cups, but we ended up running into some technical difficulties, so we couldn’t sell them,” she added. “Hopefully, in the future, we can bring those back and try to sell cups too.”

Krishnan and Hill discussed some of the challenges they faced while creating their products.

“It was a challenge learning how to efficiently produce around 40 cutting boards and signs in a short amount of time—it was definitely a learning curve,” Krishnan stated.

“It was hard trying to keep up with the inventory, and make sure we had enough for our first two events because they were only a week apart,” Hill said.

Throughout the process of creating their products, they also had to expand and market their student-led project, which also included creating a name, mission statement and an Instagram page. 

“We landed on the name ‘BHS Artisanal Woodworking’ and we were told to make an Instagram to tell people about both our journey and upcoming events we would sell at,” Beck said. “It’s important for people to know that the main goal of this project was to just gain some real world experience by going through the design process and really following through with all the steps necessary to produce and sell it.” 

“This is just for the experience and for the fun of getting to try something new and put ourselves out there and see if we can succeed,” she added.

After the design and production process were finalized, the next decision was what to do with the profits.

“Our original idea was to give the profit to charity; however, with some of the logistics of being a public school we decided to take the proceeds and turn them into a fundraiser for the design class and put it back into the [club],” she said.

“All profits go back into the woodshop,” Krishnan added, “We use the money to buy materials for both personal student projects and business inventory. In the future, we hope to donate a portion of our profits to charity as well, if possible.”

Recently, they were able to sell at the Holi event held at BHS on April 27.

“I had an amazing time, and the people seemed to really enjoy what we had to offer,” Beck said.

Junior Lilah Droe attended the event and was impressed by the products.

“I thought it was really cool,” she said. “The stand was really fun and seemed to have really nice stuff.”

They also sold at the Community Kindness event held at BHS on May 5. They were very successful at both events and made around $700 at each.

“I believe our profits were just right around $1,300. Considering the small amount that we had to put up in the beginning, we made quite a bit of profit,” Hill said.

“We’re excited to participate in more events where we can showcase and sell our work,” Krishnan said. “Stay tuned—we’re just getting started.”