From Code to Coconuts: The Story of Our Quiet Life

A few years ago, most of my days were spent in front of a computer.

I’m Oakley. At the time, my wife, Rae, and I were living in a large city, and I worked as a programmer for a technology company. My life was full of code, deadlines, traffic, late meals, and the feeling that there was always one more thing that needed to be finished.

From the outside, there was nothing particularly wrong with our life. We had work, a home, and the kind of stability people are usually told to aim for. But over time, both of us began to feel tired in a way that a weekend off could not fix.

We missed being outside. We missed working with our hands. We missed days that were not divided into meetings, screens, traffic lights, and delivery notifications.

OakenArk did not begin with a product. It began with a decision about how we wanted to live.

Leaving the City

Eventually, we stopped talking about changing our life and actually changed it.

We left the city and moved to the countryside.

It was not a dramatic escape where everything became easy overnight. There were new problems to solve, new routines to learn, and many things we had never done before. But our days started to feel different.

We kept chickens, ducks, and geese. We spent more time outside. We noticed weather again. We learned that a quiet day could still be a very full day.

Most importantly, we started making things.

At first, the things we made were for ourselves: simple wooden utensils, bowls, small decorations, and practical objects for the home.

There was something satisfying about using an object when you knew how it had been shaped, what material it came from, and why it looked slightly different from the one beside it.

We were not trying to build a company. We were trying to build a life that felt more like our own.

Learning to Live More Slowly

The biggest change was not where we lived. It was how we felt.

City life had trained us to think that being busy meant we were doing well. Slowing down felt uncomfortable at first. There was always a voice saying we should be doing more, moving faster, or planning the next thing.

That slowly changed.

We began sleeping better. We spent more time outdoors. Meals stopped feeling like something squeezed between tasks. Work became more physical and more varied. We still worked hard, but the work no longer felt completely detached from the rest of our lives.

Today, Rae and I are healthier and happier than we were during those years in the city. That does not mean our life is perfect or free from pressure. Running OakenArk brings its own long days and difficult decisions. But we understand much better what kind of life we are trying to protect.

We want enough work to feel useful, enough quiet to think clearly, and enough time to notice the people, animals, materials, and small routines around us.

How Coconuts Became Part of the Story

Friends and family began noticing the things we were making. They would pick them up, ask questions about the wood or the finish, and sometimes ask whether we could make something for them.

That was the first time we began to wonder whether this way of making could become more than something we did at home.

At the same time, we were paying more attention to materials. We wanted to understand what we were buying instead of simply choosing whatever was most convenient.

That search eventually brought us to coconut shell and to suppliers in Vietnam.

Coconut shell interested us because it already had a shape, texture, and history before we touched it. Once cleaned, cut, sanded, and finished, each shell remained a little different. Some were darker. Some had stronger grain. Some were slightly rounder or deeper.

We liked that.

We began using coconut shell in bowls and other home products, alongside materials such as wood, cotton, woven fibers, and other natural materials.

Those early products shaped OakenArk more than we understood at the time. They taught us not to be afraid of natural variation and not to expect handmade objects to look as if they had come from the same mold.

Then Wool Entered Our Lives

Later, we began working with wool.

Needle felting felt very different from working with coconut shell or wood. There was no fixed form waiting inside the material. A small amount of loose wool could slowly become a face, a paw, a coat, a hat, or an expression.

The work was patient and sometimes frustrating. You could spend a long time adjusting something as small as the angle of an eye or the shape of a cheek. But that was exactly what made it interesting.

Wool allowed us to make things that had personality.

A mouse could look nervous. A bear could look annoyed. A bird could look proud of itself. A Santa could look as though he had just remembered a joke.

We started making more of them.

Over time, those small felt characters became the center of OakenArk. Today our work includes animal figurines, seasonal characters, wedding keepsakes, felt flowers, ornaments, and other handmade collectibles.

You can see many of those pieces in our Handcrafted Gifts collection .

OakenArk Became More Than the Two of Us

As more people found our work, there was a point when Rae and I could no longer do everything ourselves.

That could easily have become the moment when OakenArk stopped feeling personal. Instead, it became another part of the story.

We started teaching needle-felting skills to women in our local community. Some had never worked with wool before. The first pieces were not perfect, and they were never expected to be. Felting is a skill learned through repetition: how tightly to shape the wool, how to build a form gradually, how to control small details, and how to recognize when a piece is finished.

Over time, many of them became skilled makers in their own right.

What began as Rae and me learning to make things for our own home became work that could be shared with other people.

We have also been able to provide suitable paid craft work to several people with mild disabilities. Different people are comfortable with different parts of the process, so tasks can be matched to the work they are able to do well and consistently.

We do not think of this as a charity project, and we do not want to describe the people who work with us that way. They are part of the work. They learn skills, make things, earn income, and contribute to finished pieces that are sent to customers around the world.

That matters to us.

The Workshop Changed Our Idea of Success

When I worked in technology, success was easy to measure. There were projects, deadlines, promotions, salaries, and numbers on a screen.

OakenArk has taught us to measure some things differently.

Of course the business needs to work. We need to pay people fairly, buy good materials, improve designs, replace mistakes, ship orders on time, and make enough money to keep going.

But there are other things we notice now.

A woman who had never held a felting needle becoming confident enough to make a difficult character. Someone finding a kind of work that suits their abilities. A maker teaching a newer maker the same technique she was taught months earlier. A customer writing to tell us that a tiny felt animal reminds them of someone they love.

Those things are difficult to put into a spreadsheet, but they are part of what OakenArk has become.

We Still Want a Quiet Life

OakenArk is much busier today than it was when we were making a few things for our own home.

There are more products, more orders, more people involved, and many more decisions to make.

But Rae and I still talk about the same question that started all of this: what kind of life do we actually want?

We do want OakenArk to grow. Growth allows us to improve our workshop, develop better products, support more makers, and share the work with more people.

What we do not want is growth at any cost.

We want to grow thoughtfully rather than simply grow quickly. We want to keep enough room for careful work, good materials, training, quality checks, creativity, family, animals, meals, gardens, and ordinary quiet days.

For us, success is not making OakenArk as large or as fast as possible. Success is being able to grow without recreating the life we once chose to leave.

Serving People Became Part of the Work

One thing we did not expect when we started was how much of the work would eventually be about people rather than objects.

A customer may be looking for a wedding keepsake. Someone else is choosing a small figure for a friend who is going through a difficult time. Another person is building a collection simply because the characters make them laugh.

We hear these stories every day.

They remind us that the object leaving our workshop is only one part of the exchange. Our job is also to answer questions, fix mistakes when they happen, listen carefully, and make sure the person on the other side feels that someone is paying attention.

We like that OakenArk allows us to serve people in a very ordinary way: making something carefully, packing it properly, answering an email, solving a problem, or creating a small object that happens to mean more to someone than we could have predicted.

What Has Stayed the Same

The products have changed a lot since those first days.

We went from code to countryside life, from wooden objects to coconut shell, and from practical home goods to a growing world of wool characters.

The workshop is no longer just the two of us.

But the reason behind it has changed surprisingly little.

We still prefer materials you can touch and understand. We still like objects that carry small signs of the person who made them. We still believe that not everything needs to be perfectly identical to be well made.

And we still want our work to support a life that feels healthy, useful, and human.

If you would like to know more about Rae, me, the name OakenArk, and the ideas behind the brand, you can visit our Our Story page.

For information about our wool pieces, handmade variations, materials, display, and care, see our Materials, Craftsmanship & Care information .

Still Learning

I sometimes think about how different my days look now.

There are still computers. There are still spreadsheets, messages, deadlines, and problems that need solving. Running a business does not magically remove any of those things.

But there is also wool on the table. There are animals outside. There are people in the workshop learning from one another. Rae and I are building something together, and at the end of many days there is a physical object sitting in front of us that did not exist that morning.

That is a life I understand better.

OakenArk is still changing, and we are still learning what it should become. We do not have a perfect plan for the next ten years.

We only know what we want to protect as we move forward: our health, our happiness, our respect for nature, the dignity of good work, the people who make things with us, and enough quiet in our lives to remember why we started.

Thank you for being part of it.