House of bamboo

San Diego Union Tribune, United States
Cutting boards started couple’s business of green products
By Emily Vizzo
UNION-TRIBUNE
SAN MARCOS – Long before they began crafting cutting boards, cutlery, countertops and sinks from hardy bamboo woodcuttings, Tom and Joanne Sullivan were accustomed to working with their hands.

Tom Sullivan, 51, worked as a shipwright, building powerboats and sailboats in the Los Angeles area before moving to San Diego County in 2007. Joanne Sullivan, 55, worked as an artist, focusing on porcelain, weaving and Chinese brush paintings.

Now, their San Marcos-based company, Totally Bamboo, includes more than 200 products in more than 3,000 stores, Joanne Sullivan said.

When the couple met in 1997, they were working the craft fair circuit, setting up tables to sell their wares, Tom Sullivan said. He was selling the handcrafted oak chairs he had designed as a hobby, and his future wife sold her artwork.

By the time they married in 1998, one of Tom Sullivan’s designs had become a hit: A 35-pound director’s chair had become a darling of the Hollywood industry, he said. The chair was a favorite for several big-name movie stars and the Sullivans would entertain themselves by pointing out the chair on television talk show sets, Joanne Sullivan said.

Although fans said they loved the heavy feel of the chair, prop masters complained it was too heavy and cumbersome, Tom Sullivan said. So they began looking for a lighter material. Ideas from friends included aluminum, carbon fiber and laminated bamboo.

The Sullivans tried making two or three chairs from commercial bamboo flooring they bought expressly for the project, but each chair took more than 50 hours to complete.

“Since the chairs sold for $200, we just couldn’t do it,” Joanne Sullivan said. “We kind of scrapped the idea.”

Joanne Sullivan decided to experiment with the unused scraps of bamboo flooring. She took home a slab of flooring and created a cutting board. Impressed with the board’s resilience and look, the Sullivans decided to make about 20 cutting boards that year to distribute as Christmas gifts for their family, Joanne Sullivan said.

On a whim, they took a handful of bamboo cutting boards to an Arizona craft fair to showcase alongside their specialty chairs. Joanne Sullivan was worried they would sell out of their planned Christmas presents, so they slapped the cutting boards with a price tag they assumed no one would pay – around $80 per board.
Within two hours, all of the boards were gone.

“This was way before green,” Tom Sullivan said, referring to the increase in eco-friendly products on the market. “We were on the crest of the wave. We’re pretty good at market trends. Being in the craft fairs is being in the trenches. We went home with literally a shaking excitement. We knew we had a tiger by the tail.”

They purchased large quantities of commercial bamboo flooring and went to work creating a line of cutting boards. Eventually, they traveled to China to partner with a manufacturer who could produce the boards in larger quantities.

Later, they branched out to design and create other products and now have a line of about 200 bamboo products, from kitchenware to countertops, sinks and chairs.

Totally Bamboo products sell in Crate & Barrel; Bed, Bath & Beyond; Macy’s; and Dillard’s, Joanne Sullivan said. The cutting boards are their best sellers.

The Sullivans say they are proud of the fact that they design and test their products in-house.

“It’s a quality issue,” Tom Sullivan said. “We didn’t build to sell cheap. We’re sticklers on quality.”