Oshosi Handmade Bows: Building a Website for a BC Bowyer

Oshosi Handmade Bows is the workshop of Christopher Applewhaite, a traditional bowyer on Salt Spring Island who builds wooden bows entirely with hand tools. We made the photographs and built his website, oshosihandmadebows.com.

Who is behind Oshosi Handmade Bows?

Christopher has been drawn to bows and archery his whole life. He is a traditional bow hunter who also shoots for the pleasure of it, and he builds because he loves it rather than to fill a catalogue. There is no sales team and no stock room behind the site. There is one maker, a rack of finished bows, and staves seasoning overhead, waiting their turn.

Every bow that leaves the workshop is a functional weapon, made to be drawn, shot, hunted with and enjoyed.

— Christopher Applewhaite

How are these BC handmade bows made?

His preferred wood is Pacific yew, whose sapwood is strong in tension and heartwood strong in compression, so a stave already carries a natural laminate of its own. Most of what he works was salvaged ahead of logging. A bow is roughed out with a hatchet and drawknife, brought closer with a rasp and scraper, then tillered back and forth between the tillering tree and the bench until both limbs bend the same. Days of work, spread over weeks, on top of the years the wood has already spent drying.

Photographing the workshop

We spent a couple of days in and around the shop. Tools on the wall, shavings on the bench, shave horses under the pavilion on a workshop weekend, and Christopher drawing a finished bow on the road through the trees, which became the first thing anyone sees. Every bow was then photographed against the same cedar shingles in the same raking light, so the rack holds together as one collection as bows come and go.

A rack, not a checkout

A bow is fitted to a person the way a pair of boots is, so the site shows a rack rather than a shop. Each bow has its own page with its wood, its materials, its draw weight and its draw length, and every one of them ends in the same place: a button that starts a conversation. Sold bows stay up, marked sold, because the rack is his portfolio as much as his stock.

Built on the Folklore ecosystem

The site runs on the Folklore ecosystem, a platform we have been building from the ground up. The part that takes the work is not the public pages. It is what sits behind them: the client management a working creative actually runs their business on.

So an enquiry here does not land in an inbox and get lost. It opens a private conversation for that person, Christopher answers it from the workshop, and his reply arrives as an ordinary email they can write straight back to. Only the parts a bow maker needs are switched on, he edits the pages in place, and he keeps the whole thing current himself between days at the bench.

That is how we approach a website for a maker: start from what the work actually needs, make the photographs for it, and hand over something the person can keep running on their own. If you make things, on the island or anywhere else, and want to talk about a site of your own, get in touch.