Today we’d like to introduce you to Ghermayn Baker.
Hi Ghermayn, so excited to have you on the platform. So, before we get into questions about your work life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today.
My wife Christina and I founded Point by Point Studio in 2022, representing a significant career and life pivot for us. Feeling the burnout of the COVID pandemic, I had resigned from my marketing executive position with the intention to explore my artistic interests — reactivating a part of me that had been dormant since childhood. However, after a missed step on the stairs left me with a broken foot just a few weeks into my freedom, I found myself bedridden with idle hands.
Meanwhile, after spending ten years working in management consulting, Christina came out of the pandemic seeking a deeper connection to the community and boomeranged back to her hometown of Long Beach, CA. She left her comfortable corporate role to work front-of-house at a local bakery and started small business consulting on the side. One of Christina’s clients was Dazzles, a vintage furniture store in Palm Springs that had an extensive collection of cane and woven furniture. However, most of the pieces were broken, and the owners hadn’t found anyone who knew how to repair them.
I decided to re-cane one of the chairs Christina had seen at Dazzles, figuring the project would scratch my creative itch and bought a couple of books to learn how. 36 hours of weaving later, I finished my first chair. I felt a deep fulfillment from the repair process; we recognized the huge opportunity at our fingertips. Putting our corporate backgrounds to use, we officially launched our business a few months later.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not, what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
While we initially thought that getting business would be our biggest hurdle, we were surprised to see an immediate demand for our services. To us, it proved our hypothesis that people really did care about their furniture and would prefer to fix it rather than replace it when given the option.
However, the flip side of being in a niche market is that we didn’t have a lot of initial anchor points to properly price our services. Figuring out our pricing was a process of trial and error for the first handful of months, and we significantly underpriced too many projects to count before we became confident in ensuring fair pricing.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
Our studio specializes in the repair and restoration of cane, rattan, wicker, Danish cord, and other woven furniture. We primarily focus on restoring antique and vintage furniture with design-appropriate materials, but we also work with clients to design custom furniture pieces. Our customers range from individuals who are looking to repair their beloved dining sets to local vintage stores to interior designers and home stagers.
What are your plans for the future?
One of our big goals as we continue to grow our business is to engage our local community more deeply in the work we do by offering educational classes and workshops. We’ve gotten a lot of interest from folks who are curious about the craft itself, and we see an opportunity to expand the impact of our work even more by passing on the knowledge of chair weaving to as many people as possible.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.pointbypoint.studio/
- Instagram: @pointbypont.studio
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pointbypoint.studio
- Linkedin: https://www.yelp.com/biz/point-by-point-studio-long-beach
Image Credits
Thomas Cordova
Tom Underhill
