30 Years of Crafting: The Last Decade (2016-2025)
This is the last installment in our series of blogs chronicling our business history and 30 years of crafting smiles! There have been three other blogs broken down into a timeline which you can read on our website. Here is the first years and you can read the second here.
From 2016 until 2019, we continued to do classes on the farm, host outside events throughout the year and hold Create Your Owns for every season. We also continued to grow the retail side of our business both online and on the farm. In 2017, we did another major renovation to the gift shop. We reconfigured our work spaces to make the store even bigger. The shipping area was moved to an entirely newly built building, and we doubled the size of the gift shop. We also tore down the building outside that housed the dry raw gourds and moved them into our gift shop so that it is climate controlled and a much more comfortable shopping experience.
In 2019, tragedy hit our Meadowbrooke family as we mourned the loss of Shawn, one of our founding members, who passed in the spring at the age of 46 after working for Ben for 33 years, 24 years with Meadowbrooke Gourds. He was an intricate part of getting Meadowbrooke Gourds going and he is still sadly missed.
In 2019, we also introduced our new Littles line. These sweet little gourd designs for every season were perfect for office desks, smaller spaces and shelves. They complimented our larger gourds beautifully and completed gourd families. Our Village line was also introduced. These whimsy little Village homes and accessories were cut in our wood shop behind the gift shop and looked so cute with the new Littles line.
2020, what can we say, except CRAZY!!! We were closed from March 17th until May 21st. During this time that a handful of us helped to make around 10,000 PPE masks for local health care providers at the farm following the CDC guidelines.
In the summer, we held outdoor concerts keeping everyone far apart but still able to get out of the house for a while. We also started doing Zoom classes to help cure some of the boredom. Since so many of our employees were family, we were able to put gourd craft kits together and mail them out to our wonderful customers who were looking for fun projects to do at home. It was one way we could still stay connected to our customers. Zoom classes were one of the things from Covid that we continued doing to this day.
In 2021, we introduced yet another line, our Coastal Collection. This is very popular with our beach-loving customers and stores that sell our gourds that are along the coast.
In 2022, Meadowbrooke made some major changes in leadership of the business. Ben retired for good this time (although he still helps on the farm when needed, makes the outdoor cottages and gives input for easier ways to do things). He and Denise started watching their grandchildren full-time, which currently consists of two boys and three girls. This keeps them very busy during the week. The new owners, which consists of their three children, Brandon, Nathan and Ashley, me (Dori, retail manager) and Ken (production manager) took over in January.
Many of our far away customers missed out on our annual Oops sales throughout the years and were always asking us to sell them online. In the fall of 2024, we held our very first Facebook Live Oops sale so customers all over would be able to take advantage of discounted gourds with minor flaws. This was a big hit, and we have continued to do it every season since. Now everyone can get the benefits from our Oops sale.
Which brings us to 2025! Looking back Meadowbrooke Gourds began with five people, twenty products and lots of hopes and dreams. Today we have twenty full-time employees, over 240 gourd designs that we craft on a farm that is over 200-acres, and we are now living the dream we thought about so long ago. We ship all over the country and even have some international customers.
We hope you have enjoyed traveling through time with us as we recounted all the ups and downs of starting a brand-new business in gourd crafting. We feel incredibly fortunate to be able to still be here after all this time and that is because of you, our loyal customers. We would like to thank you from the bottom of our heart for helping to support our crazy little business.