Walt Primrose: Primrose Woodworks
“I decided to move back to Rhode Island. I saw more opportunities for the type of work I wanted to do. You know, just bigger and better things out here. Rhode Island is pretty affluent. I don’t fall into that category, but it’s a place where they value the work I wanted to do. I figured I needed to be in a place like this to flourish in that line of work.”
∙ Walt Primrose
Welcome to a brand new episode of the Woodpreneur Podcast. Today, your host Steve Larosiliere sits down with Walt Primrose, the owner of Primrose Woodworks. The transition from working with his father-in-law as a contractor to becoming an independent craftsman wasn’t easy at first—it took a lot of time and effort for Walt to get his business off the ground. But now, nine years later, it seems like all that hard work paid off; Primrose Woodworks is still going strong!
“I would literally drive around and find job sites that were houses being built. I’m 10 minutes from the ocean here, and along the shoreline, there’s one giant monstrosity house after the next, they’re all over the place with constant building going on.
So I just started stopping the job sites and like, ‘Hey, do you guys need custom cabinets made or built-ins or moldings? We can do that.’
So you throw a dart at the wall 100 times and eight or ten of them stick and then you’ve got eight or ten avenues of work, even if it’s one job a year. But we’ve got one contractor that we’re almost always working on something for one of his jobs. We get a few of those and then we get the more sporadic once a year, once every 18 months jobs as well. But as a picture, they create enough work for us to constantly be busy.”
∙ Walt Primrose
The Value of Custom-Made Cabs
Walt believes that many of his clients are drawn to custom-made pieces because they want their homes to be unique. He uses prefinished maple veneer plywood to make his products, which are designed specifically for each client’s space.
“I guess they want something that their neighbor doesn’t have, they want to be able to say, ‘We had that custom made.’ So they can beat their chest a little bit, not because I make it, but because it was custom-made in general.
I think it’s just that many of the people we work for want their homes to be unique. To me, the filler strip is the eyesore of the cabinet industry. So when we build stuff, there are no filler strips and no wasted space. Suppose you need a cabinet that’s 57 and 13 sixteenths wide. That’s what you get. You don’t get a 54 with a four-inch filler strip down to fit. So when we do a project, there’s more flow to it. A lot of times the untrained eye can’t put their thumb on it, but they know there’s something different about it. I don’t know exactly what attracts people to it, but I know they’re attracted to it.”
Want to get in touch with Walt Primrose?
Contact him through Instagram and Facebook.
Instagram: @primrosewoodworks
Facebook: Primrose Woodworks