About
Our Story- My husband, Byron Tuck,was working in a grueling steel mill and I had worked in a family greenhouse for 13 years, and had just finished 6 years in collage achieving my dream of a bachelors degree in Botany.
We had only been married a short month when I rolled our truck on the freeway and broke my neck twice and back once. Suddenly my priorities changed and I wanted to focus my time and energy working with my soulmate to grow our dreams together. My husband had six children from a previous marriage and we wanted both of us to be present and able to teach and guide our family as we had our own children and wrote our own story. With a lot of faith we took a big leap and he quit his high paying job with a path towards management, and I gave up the greenhouse I had poured my life into, and came home to start our new adventure. In the year 2000 Kotamoon Creations was born.
We started with virtually nothing, working out of a cover it garage (basically a tent) for hours using just a plasma cutter and cutting each piece by hand. Byron's first art was heat treated mountains that were etched by hand and took many hours to weld the pieces together and color with the torch. Every one was unique and took hours of sweat and labor to complete. He moved onto other original heated metal items, once he even did a 3-D set of flames that stood 5 feet high!!
I worked on learning to design our own website, learned to list on ebay, signed us up for every street fair and show we could reasonably handle. We sold from our home and from street fairs. Each piece was unique. While we loved the challenge of being creative, it was feast or famine, and we knew we had to branch out and make our little business more profitable to be able to support our family.
In 2002 we bought our first CNC for plasma cutting (even though we had no experience) and we began making themed bathroom decor. We specialized in sturdy towel racks, wall hooks and toilet paper holders. We had dozens of themes from Moose and other wildlife to baseball, football, nautical and more. Those first years were pretty hard, we spent all our time either filling orders, or trying to drum up more sales. In our spare time we were traveling half way across the country to visit his kids and be a part of their life. It was exhausting, then in 2003 we found out we were finally going to have a baby together.
While the business was beginning to flourish, we knew if life was going to get any easier we needed to come up with a new avenue. After a lot of trial and error and some great ideas from friends and neighbors we finally found a look that people went nuts for. We began a line of polished steel wall words and a new trend was born.
Our first child was on the way and we were working night and day to fill orders. Byron would grind the backs and I would polish the fronts, even nine months pregnant there was no time to kick back and take it easy. We had a new product with a unique and elegant feel that our others lacked. Since that time we have expanded into a finished product that combines wood and metal and even some ribbons and cast iron embellishments. Now in addition to the metal we cut our own wood (usually cedar)... shape and paint each piece. Every sign is finished with clear coat and we built our own oven for powdercoating. We went from providing metal for other crafters to becoming the crafter.....and loving it!
Byron and I enjoy making a high quality, elegant home decor product at an affordable price.We hope that this will be a business that our children will have a desire to carry into the next generation.
Our signs make a great gift for any occasion. From bridal showers to weddings, anniversaries to Christmas, our products are sure please even the hard to buy for friends and families. Recently, I purchased an elliptical from the want ads, when I walked into their home I was pleased to see one of our personalized signs hanging in their entryway. When I told the lady it was our work, she beamed and said how much they had loved this gift from her parents. It warmed my heart to see how our work blessed the lives of others.
We welcome custom orders and hope you can find exactly what you have in mind. In the coming year we will be introducing a new line of custom clocks and we will be bringing back our line of much requested switch plate covers. Thanks for checking us out.... Dakota