Hi, I'm Tara Wilcox. My business is Red Fox and Wilcox.
We mainly do recycled furniture out of timber and metal.
I grew up on a farm. I was always kind of out in the shed helping Dad, making a dog,
Kennell and stuff, and I always really enjoyed doing stuff like that.
Before I started the business, I was playing in a band for 10 years.
It was a travelling. It was great. I loved it.
I just wanted a break, I guess, so it's something different.
I guess this was a good way for me to still have that kind of creative outlet.
When I started making the first couple of tables, that's when I started thinking maybe I could do this.
Everyone's feedback that they were giving me was like, you know what you're doing is really cool
and you should make more.
I went and did a small business course at the RMIT just to learn a bit more about the annoying parts of running a business.
From that, I got a grant that has helped me to get here and to actually get the thing up and going.
How I started selling initially was, well, I made one at home and then my friends saw that
and also my sister-in-law, so I made the next five with four people that I knew
and then there were lots of people messaging me and asking if I can do custom sizes
and similar things and wanting to see if we had a storeroom available for them to come look at stuff.
I was like, oh, that's in my backyard.
Placing Ballarat contacted me and asked me to do 12 tables, which is great.
I think focusing more on the background of the timber and where it came from,
which is what I want to do is create that story that people can relate to
and being sustainable is something that a lot of people are aware of now
and value recycled furniture a bit more.
It's kind of cool at the moment as well.
There's plans to do other kind of pieces, to do some stalls and some seats to go with the tables.
I think it would be the natural progression from just doing the table tops.
At the moment, the legs get welded by another kind of small business guy,
but I'd quite like to learn to do that myself just to keep everything kind of in-house.
I try and pick out different colours, like the paint splatters are always pretty popular with people
and just different tones and then I bring them back here and pile them together
and just try and see what works well.
Every now and then you get a little hole, a small gap that I think is part of the table.
I've moved over to natural beeswax now, which I think is better for the table.
Just keeping it simple at the moment I think is probably the best thing for me.
I'm loving it at the moment.
I'm here at normally seven in the morning and here at about nine at night
and just continually think, I know Santa tried,
but it's just constantly so involved in it right now and it's great.
