What five years of email tells me about a good client.

I keep a folder of every inquiry that's come through the site since 2020. It's now just under fifteen hundred emails. Fifty of them became commissions. I've spent an evening or two over the last few winters reading back through the ones that landed and the ones that didn't, trying to see whether the first message predicted the working relationship. It does, more often than I expected.

The clearest signal is specificity of place. Inquiries that name a room and a use tend to become good projects. A dining table for a farmhouse kitchen that seats six on weekdays and ten at Thanksgiving. A bench for a mudroom by the back door that the dog will sleep under. Inquiries that say I want a table, or I've been looking for a good woodworker, almost never turn into a build. The piece has been wanted but not imagined.

The second signal is what gets asked about first. Clients who ask about materials before price generally understand what the price is for. Clients who ask about price before anything else are usually comparing quotes across shops that aren't really comparable, and the conversation gets harder from there. Neither is a moral failing, but the ratio tells me where the client's attention is.

The third signal is reference. Clients who mention a specific piece in the catalog, sometimes with a sentence about what draws them to it, are giving me a shared vocabulary before I even reply. Clients who send a Pinterest board of twelve unrelated dining tables are telling me they haven't decided yet, which is fine, but the first reply from me is longer and the fit conversation takes weeks rather than days.

The fourth signal is timeline versus urgency. A client who says, we're hoping to have it in the room by fall of next year, has a plan. A client who says, we need it as soon as possible, has an anxiety I probably can't solve with furniture. Real deadlines exist. But the piece I'm asked to build usually isn't the piece that resolves the actual pressure.

The last signal is deposit. Clients who ask how the deposit works, when it's due, what happens if the piece isn't right on delivery, are usually thinking about the whole relationship. Clients who try to negotiate the deposit before we've talked about the piece are, in my experience without exception, going to try to renegotiate the balance too. I don't take those projects anymore. It took me about three years to learn that lesson at any real cost.

None of this is about deserving. It's about fit. A commission runs three to five months. It's a small collaboration.