Onari Cowan’s serendipitous switch to woodworking
Published:Sunday | December 31, 2023 | 12:09 AMShanel Lemmie - Staff Reporter
In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, Onari Cowan started paving his own path as one of Jamaica’s fastest-growing food influencers. Unbeknownst to the public, however, Cowan was simultaneously building an interest in woodwork that would soon flourish into Kingston Woodworks.
“It started during COVID when I was renovating my parents’ kitchen to do the cooking,” he explained. “So I was in search for a furniture maker. I eventually found one, but the service wasn’t good. The guy told me three weeks and it was about three months and I had to keep going back to him to get an update and see my stuff sitting in the shop not being touched.”
Cowan said though he complained to a friend who encouraged him to just make the pieces himself, his lack of tools made him stall for another few weeks.
Eventually caving to buy the saw and the sander that he thought were necessary, he employed his engineering background to figuring out the ins and outs of woodworking; at first making just a few cutting boards.
After posting it on his then booming Instagram account, Cowan got a request to sell someone a cutting board. That one request led Cowan down a rabbit-hole of making cutting board after cutting board at the request of his friends and followers.
At the time, this new hobby was just filling the free time the young influencer had away from creating content and behind the scenes applying for jobs in corporate Jamaica.
“In February [2021], a friend reached out to me to ask to make an entertainment centre for her friend. The only thing I’d made before was a cutting board but I decided to take it on because I had a saw and a sander so I felt like I could’ve made anything,” he said.
Equipped with Gen Z confidence Cowan said nerves didn’t enter the equation until installation day. “Looking back on it,” he recalled, “no I wasn’t nervous. I was more excited than nervous. It felt like, [it was] doable.”
Even though the client loved it, Cowan said he had yet to consider woodworking full time.
“I was still in search of a job. At that time I didn’t think that this could have been a career. Until about March of that same year, a follower on my Instagram said to me that somebody wanted floating shelves.”
Employing the same blind confidence and a bit of research this time, Cowan became the floating shelf plug of Kingston, doing installation after installation.
In May, his frustration peaked and he decided to invest in this hobby of his rather than continuing his failing job search. Registering his business in the summer of 2022, Kingston Woodworks was born.
However, Cowan soon felt the need for expansion. He told The Sunday Gleaner, “I felt like the floating shelves wouldn’t sustain my life forever, so I wanted to expand. I wanna say thanks to my father for giving me a loan to buy some more tools. In 2022, I started doing signs. I borrowed a loan from my father to buy an engraving machine and … then in the summer I decided that I’m gonna start doing signs.”
He continued, “Within a week I got a call from Main Events who wanted me to make some Corn Holes for Appleton Estate. So I thought ‘alright, this is going on well’. So I just starting promoting that I make signs now, I make coasters, customised pieces that people want their name on or their company name, rinse and repeat. So 2023 now I decided that I wanna do more, I decided that I want to open a store.”
Taking the plunge in November, Cowan acquired a brick and mortar. “I’m planning to have standard products there, meanwhile I can do customised pieces. So I wanted a showroom because I’ve been online and I feel like it’s limited my growth. I feel like there’s a lot of things I can make but there isn’t a space that I can display it and have people see and experience the woodwork.”
After characterising his journey as ‘incredible’, Cowan countered, “When you say it like that it sounds incredible, but I’m in the thick of it so I don’t get much time to appreciate it because I’m always thinking about the next project. I don’t get much time to just sit back and just reflect.”
Holding steadfast to the mantra of forward motion, Cowan said he currently has no plans to return full time to content creation.
“Everything happens for a reason. People ask me if I’m not gonna start back YouTube. I think last year I would have said yes, but right now I feel like everything happens for a reason and everything is a stepping stone to reach somewhere else. So the YouTube is what caused this to happen because if I wasn’t planning to do YouTube I wouldn’t have started doing woodworking. I wouldn’t have needed to find a furniture man to complain about for me to start my own.”