Each end is hand made, first the hole is produced, the it is gently flattened. Cork and linen string come later!
Visit our You Tube channel for the first video
and flattening the tubes here
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The fact that the majority of small businesses fail within five years indicates our work has been okay. When choosing products from a global supply that people desire requires a bit of luck but definitely experience. We have trolled huge global trade shows for days and found almost nothing but also have been fortunate in more obscure sources and nurtured relationships with makers.
At the other end we have created our own products whilst working in our country garden. Products that have become firm favorites and stood the test of time. In a consumer market that is saturated with choices, a product that is practical, well priced and attractive is usually a good formula for sales.
We have our job satisfaction from the knowledge that Heaven in Earth has both a wide regional and urban scope. We do take pride in our goods being adopted by retailers in country towns throughout Australia and New Zealand. We are by no means an overnight success; balancing the birth of our two boys, Justin's transiting from his own career to being part of Heaven in Earth has meant long hours fitting in jobs and researching when we can.
It isn't just hard work, luck plays an important part too. Moving to a regional area when we began gave us plenty of space to grow as we grew. Having parents who are professional photographers was a enormous benefit. It gave us our look and saved much money in the first decade! Finding companies to work with and representing them before they were known in widely and nurturing relationships with them is part luck and pure joy. In the end, an overriding factor is our relative longevity has been Jocelyn. Micro businesses cannot exist without passion and drive of its founder. Keeping that drive at fifteen years and beyond is its own challenge!
So from Jocelyn and Justin - thank you. Thank you to our direct consumers, some whom have been we have known for over a decade, thank you to our retailers, those who have been buying for years and years. Thank you to magazine who gave us editorial, back when they were read and influential (!); thank you to our parents without whose support and photos this would not have been possible; thank you to our makers and businesses who have entrusted us to look after their brand and wonderful goods and thank you to our boys Scott and Sean.
]]>Heaven in Earth’s site has a distinct aesthetic — lush, homey and tactile. Much of that reflects founder Jocelyn Van Hoven’s sense of style, but a good deal of it is thanks to photographer Lance Nelson. He’s had a long, varied and accomplished career in Australia and around the world — accomplished enough for the National Library of Australia to archive his work. And conveniently, he’s also Jocelyn’s stepfather.
It’s convenient both because he lives nearby with Jocelyn’s mother, Jill Beyer, and because they can talk easily and openly about how they want a shot to look.
“It’s all Jocelyn’s overall vision,” Lance said. “We usually try and work it out and talk it out.”
Although Lance said he tries to maintain a cohesive look for the photography on the site, Jocelyn said the goal for each shot varies, depending “on whether we are showing the bristles on a brush or the shine on the steel.”
It’s important to Jocelyn to show products in context. Many commercial web sites follow the photographic lead set by Amazon, showing the item for sale in isolation, flatly lit. Jocelyn went the opposite way.
“For us, and I think for Lance as well, it doesn’t involve you emotionally,” Jocelyn said of the typical web site.
The emphasis on natural light, strong composition and context lets the customer make a connection with each Heaven in Earth product, whether it’s a bottle brush, a wool duster hanging in Jill and Lance’s home or scissors next to the branch they’ve trimmed.
“I try to control the quality of the composition and quality of the lighting,” Lance said. “You have to show the product clearly.”
After a career largely spent working with film, Lance said he relishes both working close to home and in digital photography, free of the darkroom at last.
“These days it is so easy to a good picture, technically,” he said. “It’s not so easy to take a great picture aesthetically.”
Generally, he said he leaves the styling of each shot to Jocelyn, although they said he resists when Jocelyn tries to cram a shot with too many items.
As for whether it makes a difference in sales, Jocelyn says she has no idea, and and it doesn’t matter anyway. She said, “Heaven in Earth has always been about what I like,” and it’s more important to her that the site and the photos on it look right.
]]>Here are few examples. Enjoy, and if you want to feel bad for Jocelyn, she won’t mind too much.
Quality control can be a chore and sometimes things don’t turn out as expected. In one case, Heaven in Earth contracted with a manufacturer in India to make a bird feed container. But in India, Jocelyn said, “You never know what you’ll get.” In this case, what she got was a BIRD FEED container — the letters on it were gigantic.
“I thought, oh crap. It’s like I’m being yelled at,” Jocelyn said. But she held her breath, and people happily bought them. “People don’t mind being yelled at,” she concluded with a shrug.
Sometimes a product is too good. One of those seems to be the glass citrus jug and juicer. This is a product Jocelyn designed herself; using medical equipment to make sure the measurements were accurate (so many on the market are not!), and which measurements to include. In her deal with the Chinese company she hired to produce it, the mold for which she paid thousands of dollars wasn’t to be used for anyone. Imagine her surprise when she saw products made with her mold being sold first in the United States and later in Australia — even with Heaven in Earth’s logo on the bottom!
“I should be flattered that so many people want to copy it,” Jocelyn said.
But sometimes she makes the wrong turn with no help from others. To have an idea what customers want, she regularly goes to design and trend conferences. At one of them, she got an idea to paint the slate coasters that husband Justin produces. They went to great trouble to find a food-safe, eco-friendly paint and painted patterns on coasters.
“I was all excited and figured the whole thing out, but it didn’t work,” she said. “No one bought it.”
She said she still has them, in case customers someday realize her genius.
Genius, however, does not explain “the bit of fun” that coding errors can be. One must be careful when placing orders.
In one case, Jocelyn thought she was ordering a bunch of brushed shapes like a bent finger, used to clean out overflow drains in bathroom sinks.
But alas, what they got instead were a bunch of fairly ordinary toilet plungers. “These have been somewhat harder to move,” she said, ruefully.
These things, thankfully, are more the exception than the rule.
]]>This is where Heaven in Earth founder Jocelyn Van Hoven’s partner in almost every way comes in. That’s Joe Van Hoven, her husband, partner, father to her children, packer, chief sales rep at trade shows and plenty more. He’s also the one who produces several of Heaven in Earth’s most popular items — slate products and metal S-hooks.
Joe’s journey, like Jocelyn’s, to Heaven in Earth was somewhat circuitous. He grew up in Double Bay in Sydney, on a “working class street,” he’s quick to emphasize, lest anyone think his working class airs are inauthentic. Instead, Joe has always had dirt under his nails. He studied horticulture and worked in a retail plant nursery and as a tree surgeon before starting his own business, Justin Trees (a play on his actual given name, Justin).
Justin Trees ended about four years ago, when the physical beating of the work forced him to get one hip replaced. Heaven in Earth was growing and he could help there.
“Jocelyn’s business started doing really well,” Joe said. “I was really glad to give it all up. It was much better for me cutting slate and packing boxes. The whole creation process is something I enjoy.”
He also doesn’t mind that it’s less dangerous.
Joe makes the hooks out of iron, copper or brass rods. He uses a bolt cutter to cut them to the proper length and then grinds the tips until they’re smooth.
“Then I beat them on an anvil,” he said. “Customer love the flare on the ends.”
The next stop is to put the rods in a jig built by a neighbor, Ray Cox, a mechanical engineer. Joe uses the jig to bend the rods into hooks.
Making the larger hooks can be hard on the hands, but Joe said it beats the physicality of tree work.
Joe paused when he was asked what it’s like working with his wife.
“Well, we’re married — so it’s terrible,” he said, laughing. More seriously, he said they work together well because she values his and others’ views, “and then she does what she wants.'
He also sees his role as putting on the brakes at times.
“She has a much better work ethic than me,” he said, but sometimes he said she needs to be reminded to take time for herself. “It’s hard. It’s always there, having a business. Work is always there.”
There are unexpected advantage, he’s found.
“I do enjoy going to the hardware store and knowing that most things I buy will be a tax deduction,” he said, laughing again.
Jocelyn said his help is crucial— not only with the business, but with the couple’s two sons and elderly Jack Russell terrier. Joe’s garrulous personality is valuable at trade shows, where he finds it easier to chat with potential customers.
“I couldn’t do it without him,” she said.
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Some of the brush handles and bodies used in damp environments are made by a Thermowood process, a heat treatment that closes the wood’s natural pores and makes it even more resistant to water — perfect for a bath brush, for example. Most of the Beech wood used is from FSC forests, where the wood is grown in responsibly managed woodlands.
Natural fiber brushes, of course, require a modicum of care that cheap, throwaway brushes don’t deserve. The rice root brushes, for example, ought to be moistened before use to maintain flexibility.
It took a while to get from there to here, however. Sam’s great grandfather trained as a carpenter and joiner, but his family needed him to work on the farm. It wasn’t until he retired that “he took up his old skills making such things as gates and ladders -- sometimes recycling the timber from redundant horse shafts and cartwheels -- for the farm, which had then been taken over by my grandfather,” Sam said.
His father, John, was entranced by this as a boy, to the point that when a school teacher asked what he wanted to be when he grew up, he said he’d be a carpenter.
The teacher told him he wouldn’t. “There won’t be carpenters by then, it will all be done by machine" he was told, according to Sam. It took him until he was 30, in 1981, to prove her wrong and set up a workshop next to their cottage and began designing and making things to sell at craft fairs in the northwest of England.
“A big learning curve and long hours,” John said of that time. “The country was in recession, never a bad time to start a business -- things only get better! Favorite wood was elm, dark with lovely grain which was cheap and plentiful during the 80's, sadly due to Dutch-elm disease.”
After six years, the family that owned the Creamore Mill offered to sell it to the Bucklands. The mill, about halfway between Birmingham and Liverpool, had been in existence since 1851. In addition to grain milling, it was also used for light industry in the middle of the last century.
Now the family judiciously balances some automation with a considerable amount of hand work to make its products. “There is plenty of hand work done preparing, finishing and assembling each piece,” Sam said. “Ultimately, we balance the best possible quality with economy of scale and not least, work satisfaction.”
John Buckland turning the front discs of curtain holdbacks -- similar to the bases for the string tidy (https://heaveninearth.co/products/string-tidy-with-scissors).
Even the simplest products, like a bottle stopper, brings immense satisfaction to make, Sam said. “They are made from a single piece of wood and little more than a single process of turning forms the product into something tactile and beautiful,” he said. “To me, this simplicity is efficient and appealing. “
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