Make It Simple To Serve
Simply Serving Boards is a business created for my Senior Creative Technologies Capstone Project. My goal for this business was to sell custom laser engraved charcuterie boards. The profits from the sales during this project are to be donated to The Davies Shelter in Rome, GA. Through this process, I have worked on restoring the raster engraving technology at Berry College's HackBerry Labs and improving board production efficiency.
Start Up
The beginning of this project was focused on setting up the raster engraver in the HackBerry Lab. I had previously been using a laser cutter with no raster capabilities. The images were outlined, but not filled in. After talking with Dr. Zane Cochran, I learned that the lab had an old raster engraver stored away on a table in the corner. It had not been used in several years, and it needed some TLC before running, but still worked. We got the water cooler running, the exhaust system set up, and did a mirror alignment and cleaning on the system. After that, the machine was ready to start.
Production Improvements
Now that the laser had been setup I did a few rounds of production and notice a few bottle necks in my process. The first was the native software for this particular laser is a few years old and does not have an image auto centering feature. This meant I was having to repeat the same math over and over. To speed up this process, I created a Python script to calculate the needed offset based off of the board and image size.
The second bottle neck was the board oiling process. This process would take about 3 hours of repeatedly wiping mineral oil onto the boards after they had been engraved. This process slowed me down and kept me from doing other work. After doing some research, I noticed that many woodworking professional would soak the boards using plastic containers of oil. I did not have a place to keep such a plastic container and needed work space to be mobile. However, I was able to make use of turkey brining bags to oil about four boards at a time. I could leave the boards in the oil bath for about 3 hours giving them the beautiful cherry wood color. After that, I could pull them from the bags and place them on a drying rack.
Business Selling and Statistics
During the second half of this semester long project, I was dedicated to selling product, paying off startup costs, and raising funds for The Davies Shelter. I started working on social media presence through Instagram and Facebook. I was also able to participate in the Berry College Spring market and sold three predesigned boards and one custom board.
I was able to sell 19 boards in total during the semester and raised $441.00 in donation profits. The business hit the breakeven point after selling the 9th board. The charts below show a breakdown of the business costs and customer demographics.
Example Works
