Roles
Design
Build
Brand Conception
Creative Direction
Collaborators
Elena Cronin Design
TL;DR
Designed a chicken coop pattern where anyone can staple the template onto a piece of plywood, cut it out and put it together.
I grew up raising chickens on a small subsistence farm in NW Arkansas. I learned how to design and build things in wood by continually expanding my coops as a kid. This led to designing and making clothes in high school, then designing and building furniture starting in my 20s.
During the early aughts, I spent many weekends teaching people across the Dallas-Ft. Worth metroplex how to raise chickens in the city. I continued teaching when I moved to Portland, Oregon, in 2006. In Portland, I only had a small concrete pad out back to build a coop. So I took this as a challenge to figure out the smallest amount of room three hens could live in healthfully, and set out to design a coop anyone with minimal know-how could build. This led to designing a paper template for a coop anyone can staple onto a sheet of plywood, cut out and put together. Then I created the branding and marketing plan for it. Just before I was ready to launch, I ran low on funds and took a job at Metro. Which, in essence, was three jobs in one so the Chickenship never got off the nest.
And that’s the story of how The Chickenship came to be.
This video accompanied the Dallas Morning News article published in May 2006 when I moved from Dallas to Portland. I’d spent the previous two years spreading the chicken love across the Dallas Metroplex through workshops, demonstrations, home tours and coop-building get-togethers.