When Karen Beierle’s children started taking shop classes, she asked them to teach her how to use a band-saw.
Once schooled, she started making hand-painted puzzles. Before long, the former schoolteacher realized that wooden animal cut-outs with a magnet on the back could make useful teaching tools for preschool kids.
“The wooden manipulatives are easy for a child to handle,” she said. “They are a wonderful way to bridge non-reading into reading. When children learn a story like ‘The Three Bears,’ then retell it using the figures as props, they learn language, sequencing, characterization and the other elements you have to have for reading.”
Beierle started selling her figures to schools. And suddenly, a business was born.
ChildWood , as Beierle calls her Bainbridge Island company, now employs three people besides herself – a cut-out person, a painter and an office manager.
“I had no intention of starting a business,” she said. “Now my retired husband wonders what I’m doing going off to the office.”
ChildWood is one of more than two dozen Bainbridge businesses putting their stories on display at the first Bainbridge Business Expo, running through May 2 at the Bainbridge Library.
The purpose of the exposition is to display products being made on the island and marketed to the outside world, according to Chamber of Commerce Executive Director Kevin Dwyer, who organized the event.
The expo debuted to a full house Thursday evening, with a reception hosted by the Chamber.
Some of the businesses are large and well-established, like Sound Publishing, owner of the Review and other newspapers and one of the region’s leading printers, and Sage Manufacturing, which ships its high-end fly-fishing equipment throughout the world from its East Day Road facility.
Some link into the area’s maritime heritage, like NET Systems, which makes fishing nets and equipment, or the Karlyn Group, the vehicle through which designer Mark Adams is trying to bring his award-winning maritime cleat to the marketplace.
Some are new and fast-growing, like software manufacturer Airbuquity, which employs well over 50 people, or Emerald Biosciences, which deals in the exotic science of protein crystallography, and the nationally distributed Yes! Magazine, which employs 12 at its Winslow office.
For the most part, though, Bainbridge’s manufacturers are similar to ChildWood, small-ish operations that reflect the interests and personalities of their owners.
There is W-H Autopilots, one of the country’s leading manufacturers of automatic piloting devices for boats. Its “factory” is a shop on Madrone Lane, where six employees work. Its “test facility” is owner Wil Hamm’s dock on Port Madison.
“The East Coast is our major market,” Hamm said, “and we’re selling a lot in New Zealand right now. We don’t do too much in Europe because there is a lot of competition there.”
Bainbridge Island Vineyards and Winery continues to be the loving labor of the Bentryn family – Gerard, JoAnn and son Ian, together with neighbor Betsy Wittig.
“Each year we harvest about 24 to 32 tons of grapes, which makes 5,000 gallons of wine, which is between 25,000 and 30,000 bottles,” Gerard Bentryn said. He said 90 percent is sold at the winery, with the balance in a few retail outlets, most of them local.
“We gross about $280,000 per year,” Bentryn said. “Our net – well, that varies quite a bit. But we’ve always sold all we produce, and we’ve never had to mark down the prices.”
The winery isn’t the only agriculturally based business displaying at the expo.
Dona DiStefano displays the custom herbal extracts she custom-formulates for practitioners of herbal medicine under the name of Bella Vista Botanicals, and Suzy Cook and Art Biggert show the line of herbal body and bath products from their Ocean Sky Farm.
Although precise figures are hard to come by, manufacturing is not a large segment of the total Bainbridge Island economy.
The most recent figures from the State of Washington suggest that for 1999, sales taxes collected by island manufacturers amount to less than 5 percent of total island sales taxes, city Finance Director Ralph Eells said.
But the Chamber’s Dwyer says the manufacturing sector provides needed on-island employment – more than 100 jobs at Sage, over 50 at Airbuquity and 10 or more jobs at a number of companies.
And one of the major purposes for the expo is to help grow the island’s manufacturing base by dispelling the notion that business is incompatible with the community’s values.
“This show may allay concerns in some people that manufacturing shouldn’t be on the island,” he said. “We have a small but very interesting manufacturing economy here. These are clean industries producing world-class products.”
