About the builder:

Peter Oren is a person who makes furniture and music.

After accumulating millions of streams and a modest audience as a recording artist, the pandemic hit as Peter released an album in 2020, preventing him from touring.

Having struggled to earn a living as an artist under normal circumstances, he began considering alternative career paths, including carpentry and coding in order to build a streaming platform to pay artists more (Tuneswell).

He became motivated to develop products from wasted wood a local sawmill otherwise burned.

The wasted wood was thin, intended to be used as an acoustic guitar top but too flawed for the industry’s exacting standards. He tried laminating the thin pieces together to test their structural integrity for chairs and noticed that the boards were a good size to stretch across the arms as a tabletop attachment.

The first prototype was built in 2022, called the “work from home.”

Three more prototypes followed in 2023.

In spring of 2024 Peter quit his job (he’d been a mailman for 4 months) and set out to travel with his prototype to get some market feedback and play some short-notice shows in breweries around the Great Lakes and northeast before heading to Norway to play a festival there.

While in Norway, a reaction video of the chair went viral on Instagram, so he returned to Indiana after the show to build chairs.

So far, he has built each Petoskey chair set himself, using sustainably acquired lumber in Indiana.