We’re Rachel Hawkins and Dan Hawkins, a sister-brother duo who teamed up to form Bad Dogs LLC in 2021. At the time, we’d just shared a 26’ U-HAUL on our cross-country drive from Bath, Maine (where Dan and his wife were living) to Somerville, Massachusetts (where Rachel and her partner were living) to our shared final destination, Portland, Oregon.
With the bad dogs in tow, we applied for our first joint craft fair in the fall of 2021 while working our respective jobs as an elementary art teacher (Rachel) and an architect and carpenter (Dan). At the time, Rachel had been making wheel thrown pottery for about seven years, and selling her work in the Boston area for about three. Dan had just begun carving spoons and spatulas from our parent’s firewood pile in Maine (and he had great tutelage from our dad, a lifelong woodworker.)