Good Neighbor Podcast: Delco
Bringing Together Local Businesses and Neighbors of Delaware County, PA (Delco"") and the surrounding Philadelphia Metro Region.
Good Neighbor Podcast: Delco
Brett Cardarelli with Ruftic Designs on Sculpting Stories with Natural Wood
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Brett Cardarelli with Ruftic Designs - Sculpting Stories with Natural Wood
Brett Cardarelli, the owner of Ruftic Designs, LLC drops by the Good Neighbor Podcast studio to discuss his passion for crafting live edge furniture with Good Neighbor Podcast host Bob Blaisse. And immediately imagery of Brett's Ruftic Designs was almost tangible. His journey from a carpentry-enthused child, influenced by his mother's home projects, to become the founder of his bespoke furniture business, is a tale of not just craftsmanship but pure heart. Newtown Square, Pennsylvania is a bit brighter with Brett's maple and walnut masterpieces adorning homes, doubling as functional pieces and family treasures. In today's episode, Bob peels back the layers of Brett Cardarelli's intricate work, from the collaborative vision-sharing with clients to the emotional stories embedded in each creation, like the wedding bench that now holds a lifetime of signatures.
For those drawn to the beauty of natural wood and the lore of artisanal craftsmanship, Brett's conversation is a resonating hum. Bob asks Brett to share how he balances his dual roles as an artisan and a dedicated father, ensuring his children share in the journey of his self-employment. And Brett opens up about the misconceptions and challenges faced by local craftsmen and emphasizes the foundational role of integrity in his business. As the episode comes to a close, Brett reflects on the impact of community connections and the extended reach of his handcrafted pieces, a testament to how Ruftic Designs has woven artistry with communal ties, culminating in crafted live edge furniture that is as unique as the stories they're destined to tell.
Website: Ruftic Designs
Facebook page: Ruftic Designs
Call: (610) 996-9618
--- About The Show--- Good Neighbor Podcast is a spotlight on local businesses in and around Delaware County, PA (“Delco” ) and Beyond... The executive producer and host, Bob Blaisse, is a community sponsorship advocate, business branding specialist, and publisher of several hometown magazines, including: Newtown Square Friends & Neighbors, Marple Friends & Neighbors and Newtown Edgmont Friends & Neighbors, mailed monthly to more than 12,000 homes in Western Delaware County, PA, and also available for reading online.
This is the Good Neighbor podcast, the place where local businesses and neighbors come together. Here's your host, Bob Blasey.
Speaker 2Hello everybody and welcome to the Good Neighbor podcast for the residents of Delaware County and beyond. As the announcer mentioned, bob Blasey is my name and I'm here to kind of present businesses of our community and you'll see on our screen. Here with me right now is Brett Cardarelli, and Brett is a local businessman from Newtown Square, pennsylvania, and his business is RuffTick Designs Incorporated. Welcome, brett.
Speaker 3Thank you, thank you appreciate it.
Speaker 2Brett, when I asked that you could be on this program, I did so because even the name of your business, rufftick Designs, could be representing a couple different thoughts, and I think that's great because you want some curiosity in the minds of people who look at your business. But RuffTick, it's an interesting name because it almost sounds rough, but it really is RuffTick for a reason. And why don't you tell the listeners that your business has to do with live edge, another word that they might not be familiar with? What?
Speaker 3does.
Speaker 2RuffTick Designs actually do.
Speaker 3RuffTick. We make custom-made furniture, custom-made build-outs. We do 100-year-old barn mantles. The rustic part of what we do is we try to take a living organism that's been cut down, sliced up to use, but we try to keep it in its rawest form, because that's where the beauty is.
Speaker 2I think we've all kind of seen that custom furniture, often with a really nice, smooth, shiny top, and I think I've seen the most as bar tops or even coffee tables. But what other kind of furniture would there be that people are using live edge or finished woodwork like that?
Speaker 3So I've built chairs out of live edge wood. It's wood. You can pretty much build anything that you would like out of it, and the more raw that you keep it, I think, the more texture you get out of a piece of wood. It's not just a flat square board.
Speaker 2And average homeowner, by the time you've bought some furniture. I think we all recognize oak, Some of us would kind of recognize walnut or maple. But is there any other specialty woods? I know cherry wood would be one. That's the highly most desired kind of wood to make certain kinds of furniture.
Speaker 3A lot of people like maple. Maple is a very blonde color. You can stain it pretty much on any color you want. It's a hardwood. I would say maple, black walnut and the oak family white oak and red oak they're probably the main four that people like to make furniture out of because it's so nice looking.
Speaker 2Right. Well, Brett, can you share with me a little bit how Ruftyk Designs is becoming known in, either in the community of Newtown Square, Delaware County or beyond? And I'm sure it's beyond because it's specialized service. But are you from that same area that the business is in? Do you reside in that community?
Speaker 3Yeah, I live in Newtown Square I originally came from. When I was a little kid, I lived in Overbrook, moved to Havertown when I was six and then me and my wife got an apartment over in Brynmar for a few years when I was 26. And then we bought our first house in Newtown Square. This is where we wanted to raise our family. It's a great town.
Speaker 2How many children do you have, Brett?
Speaker 3I have three my daughter Addison, who's 13. My daughter Taylor, who's 11, and Blake, who was eight.
Speaker 2Oh, that's a perfect age family. Yes.
Speaker 3I took two girls and a boy. I got my boy at the end.
Speaker 2Yeah, that's right. And, brett, I have to say as a self-employed person with children that young it is a blessing because you can kind of make your own time, but it's also a weight because you are the one making the salary. Tell me, is your business such that you had kind of invested in the skill prior and then came away from a kind of a job similar and now work for yourself, or what was your path leading up to being self-employed craftsman?
Speaker 3So I went to Aston Votech, fallcroft, and then Aston Votech. I graduated from Aston for carpentry. I knew I didn't want to go to college as a young kid. My parents bought a 100-year-old seven-bedroom house in Havartown and my mom had some knowledge of woodworking but she grabbed electrical books and plumbing books and carpentry books and cabinet-making books and she grabbed all these books and started reading and became a carpenter. In my eyes she was always an artist, painting and doing ceramics and she worked for Sears doing the window displays. So she had a knack, she was an artist, she had an eye for everything. But she ended up just I'm going to pull this window out and replace this window, or this window's stuck, I'm going to pull it apart and I'm going to fix it. And she just Nowhere here. Yes, and she learned how to do all that stuff and just on her own and with just family and friends and some neighbors, she took that house from this 100 year old house to a really nice place for us to live.
Speaker 2That's fantastic. You don't usually hear the mom being the inspiration for Carpentry, but I can see that it came from her being an artist at heart, and I imagine, then, that you are as well To that point. Do you find that most of your clients are looking at your art, looking at your designs, and saying, gee, that's beautiful, I want that. Or are they actually coming in with the kind of half knowledge of what they want but they can't really get it all out? And then that's where your artistry comes in and says I think I understand what you're having in mind. Now let me design.
Speaker 3Yeah, absolutely. People come in with inspirational photos and even when they call me on the phone I say do you have a photo of sort of what you want? So I have people who bring 10 photos in and we basically you make a storyboard out of all these photos going. I like to finish on this one, but I like the two tone color of the woods on this one. So you have to pick and pull from their brain of what they're trying to think of and I can visualize things in my head that some people can't when it comes to working with wood. Some people just work with dimensional lumber. That's completely fine, that's a. You can make all different kinds of stuff with that. You're working with the live edge stuff. You don't have a straight line on anything to go off of. So you've got to kind of figure out how to do it. With the client's help in telling us what they want, we can come up with a beautiful piece of furniture, a beautiful art piece for their house, whatever they're looking for.
Speaker 2Right, you know, it just clicked. It really just clicked. Rhett, the live edge, I mean I thought I knew what you were talking about, but now I really get it. It's and for the listeners, I mean, we all have seen it. It's beautiful, polished, shiny wood, but the edge of it is still left with. I don't want to say bark, but you can tell that it once was a trick and that's the live edge purposes, right?
Speaker 3And it leaves that wavy character into the piece of wood Instead of, like I said, just having a square rectangle of a piece of wood with routed edges. Now you have this beautiful flow of nature just in your house. My dining room table in my house is a one piece, 48 inch by seven foot long piece of tree. You know that we put a hundred year old barn bean legs on and you just get this really cool, unique piece of furniture.
Speaker 2Yeah, because the length of it, say, are not squared, they're not straight, but they're straight enough and it's that non-straight look but with the look of a live edge that is really making it attractive. And I think certainly the thing that makes it attractive is the finish that's put on it Beautiful, like it's layers of stain and that kind of stuff. Right, Not stain, but what would be shown no you're the same.
Speaker 2So now that we're kind of focused in on what live edge is and again I keep going back to the rough tech name because it's rough live edge, it makes sense, but it also is kind of fun because that's a lot of heavy wood to pick up you have to be kind of, I would imagine. You have to be a strong person, you have to be a guy who really kind of loves a little bit of a rough edge and you certainly don't have like sound like you have a rough edge but you have a heart for the rough edge. That in itself is a misconception in a way. What is the misconception of the live edge business? What do people think coming in? And you have to kind of reset them a little bit to understand what this is gonna mean in creating a piece of art.
Speaker 3It's, the piece of wood is already the character. You're to cut into a piece of wood like that and to make a weird shape out of it and lose those live edge things People have the misconception of. Live edge is dirty. It's you know, you know so you know it's in the eye of the beholder. I guess you could say so, you know. But a lot of the people who come in here, they they're coming here for a reason that that's. This is what we do. We work right edge wood because we know how to work with it.
Speaker 2I I think, now that I'm getting it and I recognize that the number one thing that I suddenly now have to kind of recognize is live edge furniture. It are all one of a kind and I guess there's there's manufacturing companies out there that could imitate live edge and and maybe it's even imitating that. They're all unique, but in your craftsmanship they are all unique and in that sense they're either made to order the design that someone has in mind and then you take it to the level that they're not even fully visualizing, or you know they're coming in with with a really clear example, but they know that you're gonna be creating a work of art for them, they know that it's gonna outlive them and and really you're probably creating family heirlooms, I would think.
Speaker 3I've had a lot of people say I can't wait to hand this down to my kids Just because they like to. They like to piece so much. The first really cool live edge thing I made was a bench and it had no screws. Everything was made of wood the wooden Butterflies that we had to put in it to hold the piece together, the wooden wedges that we put, pushed the leg up through the top and wedge the top and then cut it flat. It'll never come apart, but it was a wedding bench. This client took the bench to their wedding and had everybody sign it and then brought it back to me and I polyurethane it. So instead of putting a flat photo on your wall, they had this really cool Bench that people signed and I thought was. I was like this is really cool. I'd never seen that before.
Speaker 2Yeah, that is awesome. That is a work of art and it would be a family heirloom. I also kind of Feel that a bit. You know, in one sense, brett and by the way, listeners were we're talking with Brett Cartarelli, who is the owner of rough tick designs, and that's rough tick RUF, tic, rough tick designs in Newtown Square, pennsylvania. The Brett, I have to say, in case you're not recognizing it, that even what we're doing right here now a Podcast and which will be published to the internet, it will probably outlive us on the internet, just like your furniture.
Speaker 2Somebody's gonna look back on this video and go how they knew what they were talking about right or that was you know, that was the Brett Cartarelli. Yeah, I happen to own a Brett Cartarelli. Do you sign these things, brett?
Speaker 3Yeah, we put a stamp on them sometimes. Sometimes I'll put my signature on it as well if I think it's a really cool, unique piece. Yeah, so we try to get our name out there as best as we can, and a lot of our stuff is word of mouth. You know, I've had people go into someone else's house and go wait a minute, who built that for you? Oh, they built this for me, you know. And then I have I'd get a text message hey, I went to a house the other night and I saw your pretty cool thing that you made. You know that. You know it looked fantastic and thanks for what you did for us as well. So I'm trying to build friendships and I'm trying to build trust that anybody in the community and surrounding communities that they can call us and get the product that they want without having to be overcharged or somebody taking their money and running off and not finishing the job.
Speaker 3That's powerful Is what is a misconception also of contractors as well as myself and the guys who work here. We don't want people to feel that we are coming into their house and we're going to take their money and never finish their job and sometimes that's a lot to get over walking into a job site with them already having that in mind it's a big product, it's a big price tag, I'm sure it's live, it's original, and so that trust is absolutely needed.
Speaker 2You working in your community, we find you know I'm a publisher of magazines and we find that are really the people in the community that are business owners in the community. They might even have advertisements in our magazine. They live in our community. Their need to be a high integrity business is important because they live here. They live and they shop with people and they see their neighbors. In your case you have people becoming customers of yours from even much farther out, I would imagine, because of the artistry you also have to kind of ship heavy stuff. I mean, where is the farthest job from Pennsylvania that you ever had to kind of create something here in your shop but then ship out or truck out?
Speaker 3It was actually my wife's cousin in Long Island, New York. They wanted built-ins next to their fireplace, which is something we do. They had a gas fireplace put in and it was stoned. And then we came in and put cabinets, a hundred year old barn beam countertops with shelves above it and a hundred year old barn mantle with custom made corbels out of the same material.
Speaker 2I can picture it.
Speaker 3That's the furthest we've been so far. We do a lot of work in Downingtown but it's a lot of local people and a lot of local stuff. We do commerce. We have tri-state area here in Delaware County.
Speaker 2for listeners out there who maybe are not from Pennsylvania Delaware County, pennsylvania, is right at the corner, southeast corner of Pennsylvania. It's got a very rare border, the only border of its kind in the US map. It's made by a compass, that little hooky curl, which is the top of the state of Delaware. It's actually a circle done with a compass on the map that set the border. As I mentioned, we have spoken with here Brett Cartarelli of Rough Tick Designs in Newtown Square, pennsylvania. Brett, I would ask some of our guests on the Good Neighbor podcast if you weren't doing this job for your business and not all of them are owners what would you be doing? Now, that's a question to you, but I find it very interesting because most people would say you know, I quit this job and go become a carpenter because I want to work in my workshop. This is your job. So you know, as a family man, and if it wasn't doing carpentry here, what would you do if you were not the owner of Rough Tick Designs?
Speaker 3So when I was young and hanging out in the bars and stuff, I actually I had my own detailing business for about 12 years so I detailed cars. I got enjoyment out of that. That was pretty cool. I mean, we took my buddy's mom's car, took all the seats out of it, buffed it up, cleaned the whole thing. We gave it back to her and she goes did you guys buy me a new car? We were like no. She was like you bought me a new car. I was like no, we did not. This is what we do. And she was just so captivated with we brought the whole the color back to this old, dingy car. And so maybe it would be like detailing and maybe modifying, putting you know, different headlights in and stuff like that. Something simple, I like working with my hands, so it would have to be something that I could work with with my hands.
Speaker 2Well, you see the similarity there, brett, don't you? And I'm sure our listeners do? You were taking a kind of a Rough Tick car and putting kind of a beautiful edge on it. So the artistry is always there, I'm sure, with your family life, your neighbors, you're probably the same way. You're probably trying to make your community better by bringing your skills and your personality to bear in your community. And for that, with this nomination that was given to us as you being a good neighbor, good business neighbor to the community in our area, congratulations, you're going to get the Good Neighbor Pin Award. Really, it's really an emblem that you can use in your business and we want to thank you for being a guest here on the Good Neighbor podcast. Brett, if our listeners want to contact you or stop by the company, do you want to share what the address or the URL would be or the phone number?
Speaker 3Yeah, my address. It's 3606 Winding Way in Newtown Square. Our shop number is 610-325-1018. And email is Brett vCardarelli at gmailcom. If you look up Rufftick Designs, our website will come up and then you can pretty much access from anywhere through Facebook, so, I think, instagram as well. So I'm not very computer-oriented, so some of this stuff falls under the radar sometimes. But yeah, we will get back to you and we hope to hear from some people.
Speaker 2Well, thank you, brett, and thank you again for being a good neighbor on the Good Neighbor podcast here in Delaware County, delco, as it's lovingly referred to. Brett, thank you very much for being a guest on our program today and one of the perks of being a guest on our program being nominated and then becoming the Good Neighbor for businesses in the community. You're going to get to name and nominate another business that you think is a good neighbor in our community, so we want to thank you very much for being a guest on our program and listeners feel free to pass this podcast message along. You, too, can also become a nominator of a business for the Good Neighbor podcast here in Delco. The URL is gnpdelcocom. This is Bob Blasey saying thank you for listening and please listen in again for the Good Neighbor podcast. Thank you everybody and thank you Brett. Thanks, bob.
Speaker 1Thank you for listening to the Good Neighbor podcast. To nominate your favorite local businesses to be featured on the show, go to gnpdelcocom. That's gnpdelcocom, or call 610-557-3745.