Canvus: Turning Decommissioned Wind Turbine Blades Into Park Benches and "Functional Art"
Manufacturing Happy Hour
Every year, thousands of fiberglass wind turbine blades come down, and they are hard to recycle by conventional means. On this episode of the Manufacturing Happy Hour podcast, Brian Donahue of Canvus, a company based in Avon, Ohio, explains how the company cuts those blades into benches, planters, and tables for public spaces. Brian covers where the idea came from, how the team built a manufacturing process with no precedent, how it hires and leads craftspeople, and how the company has built a community and storytelling platform around the products. Brian's view throughout is that the physical product is the foundation, and that the people who make it matter as much as the equipment.
The One-Minute Pitch
Asked to explain Canvus as if over a drink, Brian starts with the material. Wind turbine blades are long, heavy, and made of fiberglass, which is "not a very recyclable material" by traditional methods. Canvus approached the problem differently. It cuts the blades into what it calls "filets" and turns them into benches, planters, and tables that people can use in public spaces.
Why So Many Blades Come Down
The host cited a figure of 5,000 to 8,000 blades taken down each year, and Brian confirmed it as a historical range. He gave two reasons for removal: repowering and decommissioning. According to Brian, a well-maintained turbine can run anywhere from about 15 to 30 years, depending on location and conditions.
Government incentives over the past 10 to 15 years, he said, made it financially attractive to take down turbines that had been up only 10 or 12 years, before the end of their useful life. Because the technology had improved, operators could replace a roughly 1-megawatt turbine with a 2.5- or 3-megawatt one on the same footprint and produce two and a half to three times the power. The larger turbines need larger blades and equipment, so the old ones come down. The metal components and the fluids, oils, and hydraulics have established disposal routes. The fiberglass blades, Brian said, were something nobody had thought about when they went up, and the industry then had to figure out what to do with them.
Origin: Adding Value Where Others Weren't
Many of the Canvus founders came from another company, which Brian described as more of a broker. It handled the metals, which he noted have been recycled "for a 100 years at least" by sending them to a scrapyard or steel mill, and the fluids, a field he said already has around 200 companies in it. The team wanted to add value by solving the problem nobody else had.
In Brian's account, the first blades taken down were simply cut up and sent to local landfills. Once the media and environmentalists picked up that narrative, the wind industry "took a bit of a PR beating," because a green, renewable industry was burying blades that would sit in landfills for a very long time. Brian said that durability is exactly what Canvus values in the blade.
The alternatives he described all involved destroying the blade. One option was shredding it for use as fuel in cement kilns, with the ash becoming a component of the cement. Another was grinding it into aggregate or filler for roads. Both required an intermediate step of reducing a 140- to 175-foot blade into 2- to 3-inch pieces, which Brian called intensive work that is "really abusive on equipment." The host mentioned other ideas, such as using blades as highway sound barriers. Brian did not discuss those; he focused on why the team chose its own approach.
Parker Kosi, whom Brian calls the first founder of Canvus, had been tasked at the earlier company, Rivercap, with finding a better alternative for the company's renewable-industry partners. Parker came to the team one day and pointed out that if you cut the blade a certain way and set it on its side, it becomes a surface you can sit on. Brian says the team immediately thought it was "an incredible idea." Parker started Canvus about three years ago. He first brought on his college roommate Seth, who has an architecture degree and was primarily responsible for the early designs and for working out how the products would be made. Parker then brought in his sister Kayla, who runs strategic growth: infrastructure and processes across manufacturing, sales, and marketing. Brian was asked to join for his experience in sales, marketing, and go-to-market strategy. Other staff came from the previous company, and many were hired from outside. Brian summed up the core insight: it is much easier to cut a blade into filets with a rope saw than to grind it into 2- to 3-inch pieces.
Why Ohio
The initial reason was simply that the team was already there. Because they were building a manufacturing facility "truly unlike any other in the world," they wanted it close enough to keep an eye on while getting it running. People objected that the wind farms are in Texas, Oklahoma, Oregon, and elsewhere. Brian said many upcoming projects are in Upstate New York, Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Illinois, so the location worked out well, and the company can bring blades from Iowa to Cleveland.
He was open that a larger question is unresolved. The team has discussed whether to open multiple manufacturing locations around the country, closer to supply and demand, or to keep expanding in Ohio and bring blades there. "We haven't landed on that yet," he said.
Building a Process With No Playbook
The facility is a former distribution warehouse. Asked how you build a roadmap for a manufacturing process nobody has done before, Brian began with a joke that was also partly an answer: you shut off the rest of your life and work 70 to 90 hours a week, with some alcohol on the late nights to get the creative juices flowing. More seriously, he described a group of people with strong opinions and a lot of tenacity, committed to solving a real problem and bouncing ideas off each other.
He called the novelty a double-edged sword. Competitively, it is great to be the only company making public-space products from wind turbine blades. But there is no playbook, and "no Googling you can do" to find out what equipment you need. The team had to decide in parallel how big a facility they needed and where it should be. They settled on one about 20 minutes from headquarters, which mattered because early on they were practically "living in" the facility, which they call a Production Studio. The building is 110,000 square feet. It was a bare box with the racking removed, which Brian described, "no pun intended," as a blank canvas. The team designed the facility layout through computer modeling "10 to 15 times" to work out the process flow. For each piece of equipment, the procurement team brought about 15 options, which the team debated before choosing.
Advice for Leaders Starting From a Blank Canvas
Brian's first piece of advice for manufacturing leaders starting something new is to be prepared for more tenacity than you ever thought you'd need, and to stick with it. His second is that "nothing great is ever built alone," so you should lean on partners.
He used equipment sourcing as an example. The team knew it needed a rope saw that could cut fiberglass blades. Such saws exist for concrete and for large pieces of wood, but the one Canvus ended up with came from Italy and is designed to cut marble and granite slabs for countertops. Cutting fiberglass also meant they needed substantial dust collection.
Beyond the big equipment, a facility needs bolts, sandpaper, dust masks, and many other supplies. Canvus partnered with Grainger, which Brian described as having almost everything a manufacturing facility needs. Grainger walked through the facility and handled the smaller needs, "the sundries and the nuts and bolts," so the core team could focus on the big vision and the main equipment. He mentioned other partners without naming them.
He argued that being new was an advantage. In his experience visiting many manufacturing facilities, companies often start production and only a year or two in realize they want to make everything efficient, when "the horse is out of the barn" and it is hard to stop and regroup. Canvus had the luxury of designing for efficiency from the start.
Standardizing a Product Where Every Piece Is Different
Every filet is unique; even two pieces cut side by side have different shapes. Brian described the company's approach as a hybrid. At one end is Ford, which he said turns out something like eight cars per minute (he cautioned he might be misremembering the number) through heavy automation. At the other is Aston Martin, where people stitch leather and assemble cars by hand. Canvus has to combine the two. The most automation it can apply is the rope saw cutting blades into filets, which he calls the "Ford side." After that, the work goes to craftspeople.
Canvus deliberately hired craftspeople who knew how to build things (houses, decks, cabinets, concrete work) rather than people with fiberglass experience or experience pouring the rubber the company uses in its benches. Blades get banged up in the air and dragged across the ground when they come down, so they carry scars. The workers smooth these out with a lot of Bondo, which Brian compared to working in an auto body shop. The cut edge would be uncomfortable to sit on because of wood and glass splinters, so they fill it with compounds to create a smooth edge. Brian said the workers learned quickly and enjoy the work.
Hiring, Leading, and Knowing When to Close the Suggestion Box
Asked for advice on setting standards for highly custom products, Brian returned to hiring. He believes it is worth paying "a little above market" for the right people. Canvus has benefited greatly from referrals, with workers recommending meticulous people they knew from other trades.
He stressed vetting leaders carefully, comparing hiring to speed dating: an hour or two of interviews and then "you're expected to get married." Leaders are the people who keep the operation running once the founding team returns to focusing on sales and marketing.
His other point was specific to craftspeople. The right ones tend to be perfectionists with lots of ideas. Brian said, "not in a disrespectful way," that the company has to know when to "shut the suggestion box." Otherwise there will be ten ideas for every problem and nothing will move forward. Everyone has to accept that the chosen solution may not be the best of the ten, make a decision, and move on.
Asked what leadership trait matters most, Brian described something like "noise cancelling": strong conviction and not reacting to every little thing. He contrasted this with leaders who see themselves as a shoulder to cry on and tell everyone things will be fine, while people bring them problems in the hope the leader will solve them. He said he has never worked in a setting where that works, though it might in some. He wants leaders who don't abandon their people but who turn a problem back with "what do you think we should do?" They should be able to acknowledge that a startup doing something new is hard, that the team may be a week behind instead of a week ahead, and still rally people. Rallying the troops is easy in good times, he said, and hard when you're setting things up.
Functional Art and Working With Artists
Brian said calling the output "products" or "furniture" is somewhat misleading. The brand team, early on with Parker and Seth, called it "functional art." Customers can order products with a finish called "primed and ready" (PAR), which means white primer and no finished coat of paint. Artists can come to the Design Studio at the Avon facility and paint them. Canvus does not tell them what to paint. They submit a design for approval, and Brian said he would be surprised if one were ever rejected; it hasn't happened yet. Products can also be shipped out for local artists to paint. At the time of recording, 10 products were headed to Austin, Texas, to be painted by artists there.
Canvus set aside 10,000 of its 110,000 square feet as a gallery. Executives from turbine and blade manufacturers, the wind industry, and partners such as Grainger and Cintas visit because they have never heard of a bench made from a turbine blade. The gallery shows the products in mock cityscapes with artificial turf. The team built walls from blade tips to divide the space, which looked "really boring" until a local artist painted a mural on them. Artists were brought in for two other large walls, and those artists came back to paint products.
Brian described how word spreads in Cleveland's art community, which he called thriving for "a smaller big city." One artist who painted a wall has a partner who, Brian said, was Cleveland artist of the year about three years running. The two returned and each painted a piece, and both pieces are now at the Great Lakes Science Center in downtown Cleveland. Artists share their work on Instagram, which exposes Canvus to new audiences. Brian noted that artists always want surfaces to paint and often press city halls for walls, and Canvus provides that surface area. In return, the Canvus team promotes the artists. Cities in Indiana have asked for a Cleveland artist whose work they saw. A dedicated team manages this PAR program. Brian, who says his own artistic ability stops at stick figures, finds it deeply satisfying to watch artists transform the pieces and communities receive them.
Manufacturing as the Foundation of Community
The company's stated mission is building a collaborative brand that inspires community. Brian said the marketing team calls it a brand, while he goes "lofty" and calls it a movement. Either way, the products are the cornerstone. They lead to collaborations with families (Legacy benches), national brands (Sponsor a Space), and partners like Grainger, and those collaborations create experiences. According to Brian, communities often call Canvus first after a delivery, surprised by how big, well made, and cool the products are. In Austin, he said, several events are planned where people can watch artists paint the pieces.
That is why Canvus put heavy emphasis on manufacturing quality. Products that fall apart or chip within a year would undermine everything built on top of them. Brian said the company "over-engineered everything." Where composite would do, it used aluminum. Where one coat of paint would work, it applied two. It uses the kind of paint applied to roller coasters and train cars. Cities appreciate that graffiti can be power-washed off without damaging the finish. Brian acknowledged the company "could definitely get away with less," but called cutting corners a bad move in manufacturing: better to make a better product and sell more of it.
How Communities Get Benches: Legacy Benches and Sponsor a Space
A business development team contacts communities across the US. Some communities simply buy the products and install them, and there have been transactions like that. Many, though, lack room in their budget or face approval processes and red tape. Two programs address this.
The Legacy bench builds on the familiar memorial bench with a plaque. Canvus uses "legacy" rather than "memorial" because the bench can honor someone still living and part of the community, not only someone who has died. Brian cited a California community that placed a bench outside its VFW to honor a "hero of the month," a local veteran. Under this model, the individual or family buys the product from the community, which buys it from Canvus, and Canvus helps the community promote it on social media.
Sponsor a Space works with national brands, large companies, local businesses, and foundations that want to give back. Brian's view is that most corporate citizens, from a small car dealership to a company with a local plant, want to be good stewards because their employees and customers live there. When a community wants, for example, 12 products for a park, Canvus finds sponsors for all 12 or for some of them and assembles the full package for the city.
Every product carries a 4x6 aluminum plaque with a QR code identifying who is responsible for it. The code leads to a story: a family's story, or, for a brand, something Brian described as a small billboard that someone is actually sitting on. The person isn't driving past at 70 mph or switching radio stations. They're sitting with a cup of coffee, scanning the code, and learning about the sponsor.
Canvus World: A Map of Stories
The Canvus World website hosts an interactive map with three pin colors. A red pin marks a location where a community has requested a product that hasn't yet been fulfilled; Canvus uses these to show sponsors where products could go. Brian noted that a local restaurant may not want a bench in front of itself advertising itself, but would want one in a park that draws people toward it, and that national brands can reach places where they couldn't put a billboard. A blue pin means a product has been ordered and is in production. A black pin marks a completed installation, whether a family's Legacy bench or a sponsored piece. Clicking a pin shows the same content as scanning the QR code on site, even from 2,000 miles away.
Brian gave a personal example. His family is spread across the country, so he could place a bench in his parents' hometown, and his sister and brother, each living about a thousand miles away, could each add their own stories. He also contrasted lifespans: a typical memorial bench lasts 6 to 10 years, by his account, while Canvus products should last about 20 to 30 years at the low end. The story attached to a bench, whether a family's or a brand's that changes over time, can live on for that long.
Stories Behind the Benches
Asked for a memorable story, Brian first mentioned schools that buy primed-and-ready products and have students paint them with handprints. The story behind the QR code can then be updated as those children progress from, say, first grade through high school graduation.
The most moving one, he said, involves the California city that uses its bench to honor veterans. Brian said the bench honors someone he believes was a Marine who never came back from Vietnam and had been an important part of that community; the man's brother attended the ribbon cutting. Brian also mentioned that Canvus is working with the VA to place products on hospital campuses. Other people have linked to favorite songs, wedding songs, or grandma's chocolate chip cookie recipe. The team helps assemble the content, but within the bounds of decency, Brian said, people can put whatever they want there: "it's their real estate to tell the story that they want to tell."
Closing Thoughts: People Are the Equipment
In closing, Brian returned to people. He described two kinds of manufacturing: heavily automated operations where people run equipment, and operations like Canvus, where "the person is sort of the equipment." Either way, he argued, the right people will get a company further, faster than simply filling slots on the floor. As evidence of the culture, he said he believes every one of the 25 to 30 people in the Canvus facility has come in on a weekend to show the place to a spouse, partner, or parents. Brian had recently shown his own parents for the first time. That is something he says you rarely see in manufacturing, and he takes it as a sign of how much pride the team takes in the work.
[Music]
Brian, I've got to be honest, when I saw Canvus hit my Instagram feed, I knew on the spot that we had to do an interview, because what you're doing, repurposing wind turbines, is so cool. So let's say you're based in Ohio. You're in Avon, Ohio, not too far from Cleveland. Let's say we're hanging out, I don't know, at Great Lakes Brewing, it's the wintertime, we're having Christmas ales. How do you describe what Canvus does? How do you tell that story in one minute, as if you're having a drink with someone?
It's a great question. So what we have done is taken the wind turbine blades, and they're long, they're heavy, they're made out of fiberglass, so not a very recyclable material in terms of your traditional recycling methods, and we looked at it differently. So we've taken those products and cut them into filets and turned them into products, and those products are benches and planters and tables for public spaces that people can interact with and enjoy.
Yeah, and I want to get some background on this, because we're going to talk about the art and the manufacturing behind it, but let's get some background on the life cycle of a wind turbine. Because I don't know if I have this correct, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think I heard somewhere between 5,000 and 8,000 blades get taken down each year, and they have a life cycle ultimately of like 10 to 15 years. Why is that? Give us a bit of the background on that.
So historically, you're right, about 5 to 8,000 blades come down every year, and the reasons for that are what we call repowering or decommissioning. A turbine maintained properly will really run anywhere, on the low end, probably 15 years to 30 years, depending on where it is, conditions, etc. There's been a lot of government incentive in the last 10, 15 years about promoting renewable energy, so there were financial incentives to take down turbines that had only been up 10 years, 12 years, not really at their full life cycle.
But what they were doing was taking down a smaller, say, one megawatt turbine, and with the way the technology increased, they could replace that with a 2.5 or a 3 megawatt turbine. So you're occupying the same footprint and making two and a half to three times more power. With that, you need larger blades and larger equipment, so the old ones come down, and you have metal components, you have fluids, oils and hydraulics, and then the fiberglass blades, which everyone kind of looked at and hadn't thought about 30 years before when they put them up, and decided they needed to figure out what to do with it.
Yeah, and one thing that I'm curious about: first of all, I do think it's interesting that you're in this cross-section of incentives motivating the life cycle, but also motivating an upgrade to a more efficient wind turbine as well. It's not taking it down prematurely per se, especially when you have a way of upcycling it like you have, but you're putting in new technology. Well, I should say you're putting in a new turbine that, leveraging new technology, is able to be more efficient. My question though is, how did Canvus decide to focus on upcycling turbine blades as products for public spaces? I mean, as I understand it, there were other options out there. They could be used as sound barriers for highways, as an example. So give us a bit of the origin story. How did this become the area you focused on?
Absolutely. Well, we were involved, a lot of us were involved in another company that was more of a broker, so they would recycle the metals, which has been done for 100 years at least, and you take a large heavy metal object and take it to a scrapyard or a steel mill and they melt it down. The fluids, the same thing; there's 200 companies out there. What we really wanted to add value by doing was solving the problem. When they first started taking the blades down, they kind of just cut them up and sent them to the local landfill and thought really nothing of it. But media got a hold of that narrative, and environmentalists got a hold of that narrative, and they took a bit of a PR beating, because you're green, you're renewable, and you're putting these blades in a landfill. They're not going anywhere for a long time, which is part of the value in the blade to us, is that it's so durable and so strong.
The other alternatives that were out there, everything that people looked at of how to deal with fiberglass blades and not send them to a landfill, involved destroying the blade. So shredding it into pieces so that it could be used as fuel in a cement kiln, and the ash could then be used as a component of the cement, or using it as aggregate or filler in roads. But it all requires an intermediate step of taking a 140 to 175 foot blade and getting it into like 2 to 3 inch pieces. That's intensive work, and it's really abusive on equipment.
So Parker Kosi, who really was the first founder of Canvus, he was working at this other company, Rivercap, and the goal that he was tasked with was finding a better alternative, because we have partners in the renewable industry. We're there to help them, and this was a problem they had. Now again, it's easy to handle the metal and fluids, but adding value is finding a solution for fiberglass. And Parker came to us one day and said, if you cut it this way and you sit it on its side, it becomes a surface that we can use as a seat. So he immediately, I mean, we thought it was just an incredible idea.
So he started Canvus about three years ago. He first got on board his college roommate, who had a degree in architecture, so Seth was primarily responsible for all of the early designs and how we were going to make these products. And then Parker very wisely brought his sister over, Kayla, and she runs strategic growth, so all of the infrastructure, all of the processes, not just in manufacturing but also on the sales and marketing side. And then they asked me to join because I had experience in sales and marketing and go-to-market strategies, and bring that on board. So that's really how we all got together. We have other individuals from that company, we have plenty of people that we've hired from the outside, but we just took something and looked at it differently and thought it's a lot easier to cut it with a rope saw into filets than grind it down into two to three inch pieces.
I love that. The other question I have, because I'm a big fan of local manufacturing and the regional manufacturing scenes: why Ohio? Was it just because you were all there, or are there other aspects that make Ohio a spot for this type of application?
So it's interesting. The early reason was that that's where we are. So if we're going to set up shop, we should do it somewhere close by, because we're setting up a manufacturing facility truly unlike any other in the world. Yes, you have walls and a roof and equipment, but no one's ever done this before, so we knew we were going to have to be somewhere close by that we could keep an eye on things and get it up and running. What everyone said was, okay, but the wind farms are in Texas and Oklahoma and Oregon and everywhere else, so you're far away. But there are a lot of projects that are coming up in the next couple years that are in Upstate New York and Pennsylvania and Indiana and Illinois, so it actually worked out really well.
We've had discussions about whether or not we open multiple locations across the country where we can manufacture and be closer to supply and demand, or do we just continue to expand the Ohio location and bring the blades here to upcycle. So we haven't landed on that yet, but it actually was very fortunate that it worked out that way for the project road map, and we can bring blades from Iowa to Cleveland. So it really worked out that, yeah, it's where we were, but there's a lot of supply and plenty of demand in our neck of the woods as well.
Well, I can say from personal experience driving across the cornfields of Illinois and Indiana quite a bit, especially in these last few years, there's no shortage of wind turbines along the interstate highways there as well. So we'll talk a bit more about community a bit later in this interview, but I want to ask you a bit more about the manufacturing side first. So I think your facility is in an old, like, cotton distribution plant. You had to create a road map for tooling, getting equipment to handle the size and scale of these blades. How do you create a road map like that for, let's say, a manufacturing process that no one's really done before?
There's a couple big factors that go into it. You shut off the rest of your life and commit to working about 70 to 90 hours a week to figure it out. There's some alcohol involved for the late nights that get the creative juices flowing. But really you sit down with a group of people that are committed to solving a problem that exists, and we have a lot of strong opinions, we have a lot of tenacity, and so as you continue to bounce things around... As I mentioned, the double-edged sword of what we do is that no one's ever done it before. So from a competitive standpoint, that's great: Canvus manufactures products for public spaces out of wind turbine blades. But there's no playbook, there's no Googling you can do to find what kind of equipment do we need to do this.
So really the first hurdle... well, they ran in parallel. We didn't know how big a facility we needed, we didn't know where it should be, and I'm glad we got one. It's about 20 minutes from our headquarters, because early on, I mean, we were living in the production studio, the manufacturing facility. We call it a production studio, but that makes it sound small, but it's really... we were back and forth so much. But 110,000 square feet is perfect, and you're right, it was a box, and that was perfect for us. It was just a warehouse. They removed all the racking, so, no pun intended at all, we had a blank canvas to work with. When we started outfitting it, we probably designed the facility through computer modeling 10 to 15 times to figure out the process flow and how things would work properly. And then we have a great procurement team that, for every piece of equipment we needed, they brought us 15 different options, and then we debated about which was best and which we needed to go through to get this up and running.
Okay, so I'm hearing great procurement team, I'm hearing the manufacturing happy hour approved activity of grabbing a beer and ideating, I'm also hearing you had the right facility for it, just like you said, a blank canvas, just a square distribution center. So if you were to provide advice to the manufacturing leaders that are listening to this episode, that are maybe having to embark on their own blank canvas type project, what advice or tips would you give them?
There's a couple. Number one is be prepared to have more tenacity than you ever thought in your life, and if you're going to do it, you've got to go out the way and stick in it. But beyond that, also realize nothing great is ever built alone. No great company came out of nowhere all by themselves. And early on we leveraged a number of partners as we were setting up our facility, because the big equipment and everything is not easy to find. But you know you need a rope saw that can cut the fiberglass blades. So they make them that cut concrete, they make them that cut huge pieces of wood. What did we need? We ended up with a saw from Italy that cuts marble and granite to make people's countertops and cut slabs. So we understood the larger equipment to a great extent. You're cutting fiberglass, you need a lot of dust collection.
But what we also did early on, because that's really the core of the business, the big equipment and the layout you've got to get right, you also need bolts and sandpaper and dust masks and all that stuff. And one thing we did early on was, like I said, we found the right partners. So for all of the needs we had, and it was an advantage being a new business, we partnered with a company called Grainger, and I'm sure all of your listeners know who they are. They have almost everything you could ever need in a manufacturing facility. But working with a partner like them, they could walk through and see what we needed on the small side, right, all the sundries and the nuts and bolts, and allow us to keep our focus on the big vision and on the core of our business, which meant getting a manufacturing facility.
But the biggest piece of advice is find the people that want to do it with you together. Grainger was one of them; we've got some other great partners we've worked with. But really leverage people, because especially when you're doing something new, one of the things you find, and I've traveled to a lot of manufacturing facilities, as I'm sure you have, they get going, and then a year or two in they realize they want to make everything efficient, and it's already kind of the horse is out of the barn, right, and you're in production, so it's hard to stop and kind of regain your footing. We had the luxury of being able to do that right from the get-go. And so that's what I would recommend: know you won't do it alone, and bring in the right partners to work with.
So I've got another two-part question here. I'm going to ask you part one first, and then we'll get your advice after that. But as I understand it, every blade, like every filet you make, is unique. There's no two alike; they're like snowflakes. Every part is different from one another. How do you create standards around that when everything you're doing is different?
It's a great question. It's a hybrid model, and the way we looked at it is, you have a company like Ford, and I heard a number once, I'll probably mess it up, but I mean they're turning out like eight cars per minute in their facilities, because they've got it so down and the automation is incredible. Then you have an Aston Martin, where people are stitching the leather by hand and assembling an automobile, a beautiful automobile, by hand. We had to combine the two, because really the most automation we can put into it, because they are all different, is using that rope saw to make the filets that are going to become products. Once that's done, they are all little snowflakes. Even two pieces that were cut right next to each other still have a different shape.
So then it goes really into our craftsmen's hands, and we hired people deliberately that were craftsmen. Not people that had worked on fiberglass before, not people that had poured rubber, which we used for our benches, but people that knew how to build things: houses, decks, cabinets. Some of our guys laid concrete. So they work with their hands, because the blades get banged up in the air, they get dragged across the ground when they're down, so they have scars. So we have guys that smooth it out. They use a lot of Bondo; it's almost like they're working in an auto body shop and they're repairing the outside of that blade. You have a cut edge that would not be very comfortable to sit on because of the wood and glass splinters that you're going to end up with, and they fill that in with compounds and make it a smooth edge. So really, once it's cut, that's the Ford side, where we just chop all the filets, and then it goes over to the handcrafted side, and these guys are excellent at what they do. They've learned it very quickly, and they really enjoy what they're doing and being a part of it.
I like that tip around hiring craftspeople, folks that have worked with their hands. Obviously they probably haven't been working on filets of wind turbines before, but they've got the foundational experience, so that's one lesson I took from there. I told you this was a two-part question, so do you have advice for the manufacturing leaders that want to create their own standards on a very custom type of product that they're making?
Yeah, definitely hire the right people. And at times, and I believe this is the way to go, it's going to cost a little more; you're going to pay a little above market. But when you get the right people... We've also benefited tremendously from people we hire bringing in referrals and people they had worked with in another trade, and they say this guy is really meticulous, knows what he's doing, or this girl. So bringing in the right people sets the
foundation, finding good leaders, which, like any hiring process, it's like speed dating, right? You meet for an hour, maybe you have a second interview for an hour, and then you're expected to get married and it's going to be bliss. But you really need to vet your leaders out, because that's who's going to keep that operation running once we come back and focus on sales and marketing when it's set up. So leadership is critical.
And the other thing is, especially with craftspeople, they're very good at what they do. Typically the right ones are perfectionists and they have a lot of ideas. And so, not in a disrespectful way, but also as a company, know when to shut the suggestion box, because otherwise you're just going to have 10 different ideas for every problem and really never get anywhere. So everyone has to put their thick skin on and say, all right, I don't know if this is the best solution, but out of the 10 that we went through, this is it, and move forward, make a decision and move on. Otherwise you'll just keep going in circles trying to figure out who has the best idea.
So tips for hiring and working with craftspeople, tips for making sure you get your leaders in place. I told you this was a leadership podcast disguised as a manufacturing podcast, at least I think I did. So I'm going to ask you one more on this topic before we change gears a little bit. What is the number one leadership trait you look for when you're interviewing folks? Or alternatively, maybe you can answer this way: what's a question that you ask in those interviews to determine what type of leader someone is?
There's a lot of different ways to get at the answer. I think one of the key traits of a leader is sort of putting on noise cancelling and not listening to every little thing. You've got to be strong in your conviction. And there really are, and I have never worked in one, but there may be scenarios where it works, and some leaders believe they're there to be a shoulder to cry on and tell everybody that everything's going to be okay, when really people will find reasons to go to their leader with a problem and hope the leader solves it.
You want a leader that is not going to abandon their people by any stretch, but also turn it back and say, all right, what do you think we should do? And if that person's empty of ideas, then they're just looking to you. But you want a leader that's going to have the backbone to say, you know what, this is tough, this is a startup, this is something no one ever has done in the world before, and yeah, I'm sorry that didn't work out, and I'm sorry we're not a week ahead instead of a week behind, but they're still going to be able to rally their troops. It's easy to rally the troops in a good time. It's hard to do it when you're setting things up and getting things going. So you need that strong leadership that's going to drive people and not really give them a crutch, but actually make them better as they move on.
I appreciate you taking us through, let's say, the people's side of the manufacturing world as we talk through this, and then some of the traditional topics we talk about on Manufacturing Happy Hour. The rest of the interview is going to be a little different, and I'm just going to dive into this question because I don't think I've ever asked this question on the show before. Your turbine seats, the stuff you create, it's an art project as well. We've been talking about getting the form and the function of the seats and the benches and all that, right? But you partner with artists to really make these unique as well. So how do you go about partnering with local artists when you do all this?
Another team of great people. So yeah, early on, saying we make products or we make furniture, it's a little misleading. Our brand team early on, with Parker and Seth, called it functional art, and that was even before we really brought in the full artist piece. Because what you're referring to is we have an option for our products to have a finish called Primed and Ready, where they don't have a finished coat of paint on them. What they have is white primer, and people can come to our design studio in Avon, Ohio, it's part of our manufacturing facility, and they can paint those. And we don't tell them what to paint. They submit a design, and we haven't had it happen yet, I'd be surprised if we had a rejected design, but they kind of put this vision out there, we approve it, and they come in. Or we can ship products out. Right now we have 10 products going out to Austin, Texas, and they're going to have local artists paint them there. But either way, it's been really unique.
So one of the things we did early on in our facility was create what we call a gallery, and it's 10,000 of the 110,000 square feet, because we have executives coming in from turbine manufacturers, from blade manufacturers, from the wind industry, and from our partners like Grainger and companies like Cintas and everybody else. They want to come in and understand, I've never heard of a bench made out of a wind turbine blade. So we created a gallery with cityscapes and artificial turf and things so they could see what these would look like in the wild. And we created some blade walls, and they looked really boring. We were using them just for delineation, so we used the tips of the blades to make a wall, and a local artist came in and painted that as a mural. We had two other huge walls where we brought artists in, and then those artists came back and painted products.
And art communities in cities, you know, Cleveland's a smaller big city, I guess. You know, we're not New York or Chicago, but there are thriving art communities, and these people talk. So we had an individual come in and paint a wall, and it turns out his partner, she was Cleveland Artist of the Year like three years in a row. So they came back together and they each painted a separate piece, which are now at our Great Lakes Science Center in downtown Cleveland. And they tell their friends and they put it on Instagram.
And what's really funny is it's great for us, right, because that artist is exposing Canvus. And every artist wants to paint something, and I know even in our small town where I live, artists are always badgering City Hall to paint. Well, you run out of walls, you run out of space. We give you all that surface area to paint. So they're promoting our brand, but at the same time our team then goes ahead and promotes that artist. We've had cities in Indiana say, I saw the work of that Cleveland artist, can you have them paint our products? And so it really becomes this full circle thing where it feeds each other. And we do have a whole team that works with the PAR, we call it PAR, Primed and Ready, that works with that element to bring the artists in.
And I have personally zero artistic talent. I'm like, stick figure is about where I end. So watching them take one of our pieces and turn it into something that's just incredible is so satisfying. And then watching those go out to the community and the people receive them, it's just mind-blowing when it gets there.
Well, let's talk about the community a little bit, because when I've done my research on Canvus, it says your mission is building a collaborative brand that inspires community. So we'll start off with a general question to go down this path. What role does manufacturing play in creating community?
It's a great question. We always believed, when we stumbled on this idea, or well, I shouldn't say stumbled, but when we came up with it, we knew the products were going to be the cornerstone of it. But we wanted it to be bigger than that, and we always talk about building a brand around Canvus and building a brand that is Canvus, and that includes the communities, it includes artists, it includes, and I'll talk about this, our Legacy Benches and then our Sponsor a Space, where people give back to communities. The marketing team that we have calls it a brand. I go lofty on them and call it a movement.
But either way, the products are the foundation of that, because what we say when we build a brand: you take our products and that leads to collaborations. It leads to collaborations with families on our Legacy Benches and national brands on our Sponsor a Space. It leads to collaborations with companies that I mentioned, like Grainger. It leads to all these different fun things that we get to do with other partners, and then that creates experiences. So when our products land in a community and they're delivered, we try and reach out immediately, but typically that community is calling us first, saying, I can't believe how big they are, how well they're made, and how cool they are, I can't wait to get them out in the park. And then take Austin for example, they're going to have multiple events where people come and watch these artists turn them into, they think it's cool already when it's white, and then they're going to watch artists make it part of Austin.
So when you go back to the first piece of that, the products and the manufacturing, we can't have products go out that in a year are falling apart, or the paint's chipping off of them, or they're just cheap and not what they're supposed to be. So that's where our heavy, heavy influence was on manufacturing. We knew if we had good products, then we could get them to market and we could get the communities and the collaborators to rally around them. But we over-engineered everything. If we could do it with composite, we did it with aluminum to make it stronger. If one coat of paint would work, we put two on it to make sure it's not going to chip and scratch away. We use paint that they paint roller coasters with and train cars, so that they stand the test of time and they'll be out there. And cities do love, communities do love the fact that if it gets graffitied on, with the paint we use you can power wash the graffiti right off, so you're not going to lose the essence of that product, which was so important to us. So we could definitely get away with less, but it's really, I think, a bad move in manufacturing to cut those corners and try to get away with something. Just make a better product and sell more of it to make that money.
Yeah, so really your manufacturing's the foundation that allows the art to thrive and stick around, not get washed off. And at the same time, the art is really kind of what starts to tie that bench, that furniture, whatever you want to call it, starts to tie it to the park, the community. I've got to jump ahead here, because I was going to ask this at the very end, but I'm sure someone is listening to this and thinking, how do I get one of these benches in my park, right? So we have to talk about this, because you do a lot of other cool stuff. It's not just building the bench. You've got Canvus World, where you have stories associated with these benches. I'm not going to go too far yet, but how do people go about getting these in their parks, in their communities, etc.?
Absolutely. So we have an entire business development team that reaches out to communities all over the US to let them know what we're doing and let them know about our products. Now, communities can absolutely say, well, that sounds great, we love the products and we're going to purchase them ourselves and put them in this park, and we've had transactions just like that. But a lot of communities don't have room for that in their budget, and they have to wait till they can get it approved, and there's all the red tape that goes along with it. And that's really where it comes down to what we call, and I mentioned it, our Legacy Benches and then Sponsor a Space.
So on the Legacy Bench side, you've seen them in any community: a bench with a little plaque, or it's carved in, that it's in memory of Grandma Helen. And they're really nice. They allow a family to honor a loved one that's no longer with us. We call it a Legacy Bench because we want it to be for a family to tell a story that may involve someone no longer with us, but also honoring someone who's still a part of the community. We've had communities, one in California in particular, that used the bench and put it outside their VFW, and they can honor the hero of the month, a veteran in the community that did a great job and a great service to our country. So the Legacy Bench, we work with communities to amplify that on their social media. So basically the individual or the family actually buys that product from the community, who then in turn buys it from Canvus.
On the Sponsor a Space side, we work with national brands and large, large companies, local businesses, and then foundations who want to give back to communities. Most corporate citizens, whether they be a small local car dealership or a company with a manufacturing facility in that town, they're good stewards of the community. They like to be a part of the community and to give back, and their employees live there and their customers live there. So what we do is we talk with those organizations, and the community will say, we want to redo this park and we'd love these 12 products. We go out and find the sponsor that will sponsor all 12, or sponsor three of them, and put the entire package together for the city.
And that comes with an impact, whether it be on the family side with the Legacy Bench or the Sponsor a Space. All of our products have a plaque on them, a 4x6 aluminum plaque with a QR code, and it tells you who is responsible for that bench being there. And the QR code leads to a story. If it's a family, it's the story of their family and the story they want to tell. A brand will use it almost as a marketing tool, as a small billboard that someone's actually sitting on. They're not driving by it at 70 miles an hour, they're not hearing the commercial come on the radio and switching it to a different station. That person's sitting there having a cup of coffee and scanning that QR code and learning more about the company that sponsored that bench in that space.
Yeah, and I think it's very cool how you've combined manufacturing, art, social media and storytelling all into everything you're doing. Because for the folks out there, I mentioned it when I was asking the question, I believe you have a site called Canvus World that's kind of a collection of all the stories where you can see that. And like you said, I think I was playing around with it or something like that, or had heard that the QR code could lead to the city's event page or something like that. It's no longer, let's say, a static bench that is like a memorial to someone, which is great, but you open up the opportunity to do more than that by creating not just a product, not just art, but more of a storytelling platform in a lot of ways, which I find very cool.
Absolutely. And canvusworld.com is exactly where you can see all these. What you'll see is a large interactive map, and it will have three different color pins, if you will, on it. A red pin means that a community has requested a product in that space and it hasn't been fulfilled yet by anyone. So that's where we can show sponsors potential areas where their products can go. You know, a local restaurant doesn't necessarily want a bench in front of their restaurant talking about the restaurant. They want it in a park that's going to bring people to their restaurant. A national brand can't put a billboard in the areas where our products can go. So everybody gets to benefit.
But so those red dots, they represent where our Legacy Benches and the products can go that are going to be sponsored. A blue dot means that it's been committed and has been ordered and it's in production, but it's not in place yet. And then finally, when it gets there, the dot turns black, and that's what we call an installation, and it means that product's there. And it can be a Legacy Bench put there by a family or a sponsored piece.
And when you click on that, it's exactly as you say. You see the QR code message just as if you were sitting on that bench scanning it, and you could be 2,000 miles away and still see it. So you can see all the content that's behind there, and you can see the story of that family. Or in my case, my family's spread out all over the country, so I could put a bench in my parents' hometown that my sister can update the
content from a thousand miles away, my brother from another thousand miles away, can add in the stories that they want to be a part of that, and then anybody else can see it. When they look at Canvus World, you see all of our products, whether they're there yet or not. It gives everyone the opportunity to see how far and wide this art, and this functional art, can be out there. Because memorial benches are awesome, but a typical bench will last 6 to 10 years and then that's kind of gone. Our products are going to be out there on the light side really from about 20 to 30 years. So that story, whether it be your own story or a brand story that they change over time, it lives on for that long, and they get to take advantage of telling that story for that long.
Yeah, this has been a great lesson in upcycling, particularly when you've got something that's not terribly easy to recycle by traditional means. You found a great way to repurpose that, and I think for our audience that's very used to hearing us talk about, let's say, traditional manufacturing applications on this show, I hope this has been a way to maybe look at manufacturing differently a little bit today and see where it intersects with art and community. I have to ask you, I think a fun way to end this interview: we've just been talking about Canvus World, how you can share stories, how it can be an advertisement, whatever it is. Is there a cool story that sticks out? Like, if you were to tell one of the stories behind the benches that you've built, is there one that is front of mind that would be cool to hear for the audience?
There are so many, and there are a couple where a product that's going to a school, they'll buy one of our products and then have all the students put their hands in paint and put it there. So five years, 10 years, when those kids are graduating from high school, that story can be updated as all of them progress from, let's say they did it in first grade, all the way through high school. There have been a couple of those.
I think the most moving, and I alluded to it before, you know, we're currently working with the VA hospital to get products on their campuses, but Tehachapi, California is the city that uses that bench, and they're using it to highlight, I think he was a Marine that never came back from Vietnam but was a big part of that community. His brother was at the ribbon-cutting ceremony, and it was really moving to see that story behind it and allow that family to honor, you know, their veteran who was in their family. That's probably the one that sticks out to me the most.
You know, there's so many different ways to do it. People have links to their favorite songs or their wedding songs. We've had people that have links to Grandma's chocolate chip cookie recipe. It's all there for them. Our team helps them put it together, but really, within the bounds of any sort of decency, they can put whatever they want in there. It's their real estate to tell the story that they want to tell. So it's been really, really fun to see the different versions and different ideas that people have on how to use that.
Well, I've loved hearing just the sampling of stories today. I've loved hearing the story behind Canvus, and I'm excited for all the stories yet to come as your business continues to grow. Last question: is there anything you wish I would have asked, or any final words of advice or call to action for the audience before we wrap up today?
Nothing I wish you would have asked, but I will say one thing that I was thinking as we were talking about the manufacturing and the people. You know, people are really the, beyond, our products don't happen without our people. And manufacturing kind of happens in two ways, right? There's heavy automation where people operate equipment to make a product, and then there's manufacturing like ours where the person is sort of the equipment in that scenario, manufacturing the product. Either way, having the right people is really going to get you so much further faster than just trying to fill slots on a manufacturing floor.
You know, we're very fortunate to do something that no one's ever done before, and as I've mentioned, I've been around a lot of manufacturing. I think every one of our people in our manufacturing facility, there's 25 to 30, have on a weekend brought their wives or significant others or their parents. I just had my parents in town and showed it to them for the first time. You don't see that in a lot of manufacturing, where they want to go there on the weekend and show their family what they do. So it's really rewarding to be a part of something like that, and then have them telling their friends about it and really taking a huge amount of pride in what they're doing and being part of a really cool story.
Yeah, like I said at the start of the interview, I saw it on Instagram, I saw the vibe of the facility, the stuff you were creating, and I'm like, this is perfect for Manufacturing Happy Hour. So I would have been excited to go in on the weekend as well, I'll say that. Brian, I just want to thank you for taking the time to jump on the show, and I'm looking forward to sharing the Canvus story with the Manufacturing Happy Hour audience. Thanks so much.
Thank you for having me.
Cheers.
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