About

I went to UW-Stout for product design and industrial design. Then, right as I was finishing, they started a multimedia program with 3D modeling in it, and I thought: yes, that. Two more years.

Here is the part that has aged well. That multimedia program leaned hard toward building websites, and I told every advisor who would sit still that I was not doing that. I was there for 3D and product development. I said it a lot. I was very clear.

Then I finished, and they announced a game development program. Of course they did. Almost seven years at Stout and I missed it by one semester.

Every interview went the same way

I went looking for product design work. Every single person who read my resume saw the word multimedia, looked up, and asked if I did websites. No. Next interview: do you do websites? No. Next one: websites? No.

Eventually I ran out of no. Fine. Yes. I do websites.

I never actually interviewed for the job I have had for fifteen years

My wife Kristine had just started at Pazzaluna in St. Paul ... first week ... and Scales Advertising was in there pitching the restaurant. Somewhere in that conversation the account execs got talking to her, and she mentioned that her husband did this kind of thing too.

They called me that evening. I came in for what I thought was a tour. Scales was forty people then, with a whole team on 3M, a whole team of graphic artists, and six people in interactive. They walked me through the building, got to the interactive room, and somebody said we could use some help ... could you help out?

Two days later I was on a project. I contracted for a while and they hired me on. I have never met HR. I have never met accounting. There was no interview, and there is still no interview, and at this point it would be strange to ask for one.

Forty people became two. I outlasted everybody, which is either a good sign or a very funny one depending on the day.

What the last fifteen years actually looks like

Somewhere north of 125 sites, and about ninety percent of them are outdoor brands ... coolers, game calls, sonar, shotguns, tree stands, concrete. Walt and I built that roster together over a long time and I am genuinely proud of it. I have done the big corporate accounts too, and I would rather do this. These are people who make a physical object, know it inside out, and need somebody to sell it properly on the internet.

BODE Design is the same person doing the same thing under his own name, for clients who come to me directly. Two hats, one guy, and no confusion about which one is on: if you hire BODE, the person who sketches it is the person who builds it and the person who picks up the phone in year three.

Nine stores, one framework

Nine client Shopify stores run on a framework I wrote and maintain in one place. I fix something once and every store gets it, and each storefront keeps its own design through the update instead of quietly turning into somebody's template. It is the reason a small manufacturer can have a store that behaves like a much more expensive one.

The degree eventually paid off

The industrial design half finally got its moment: one client's entire product catalog is 3D renders instead of photographs. One parametric Blender file, forty-one products, five angles each, built off the real hardware CAD and checked against reference shots. Add a colour next spring and it re-renders. There is never a second photo shoot.

So the seven years were not wasted. They just took a while to become relevant.

Tracking that has actually been tested

Every launch gets its conversion tracking wired and then verified with a real order, not a green checkmark on a dashboard. One client's lead count looked great until I traced twenty-three of them to a single bot in Hungary. The fix was to move the conversion server-side behind a spam guard and then sit there testing it in a browser until two real submissions produced exactly two events and nothing else.

What happens if I get hit by a bus

Fair question and the answer is boring, which is the point. Every site lives in its own git repository that you can be handed. Every project has a written handbook covering how it is built, how it deploys, and how to put it back when something breaks, and the restore runbooks have actually been run rather than just written. Nothing about your site is stored only in my head.

Where I am and what I am doing when I am not doing this

River Falls, Wisconsin, since COVID. We were in St. Paul before that. The drone footage on the front page is my family's land, shot on a morning I probably should have been working.

Three kids, which means I am now a sports dad in the full and unrecoverable sense: football, wrestling, baseball, gymnastics. I coach some of it. I photograph most of it. If I do not answer immediately on a Saturday in February, I am in a gym somewhere holding a camera.