Remember that little box where you kept all your secrets and treasures when you were a kid? Now you can have one as an adult – and you’ve probably got better secrets.
Cindy Rothweiler and her brother, Mike Eich, make Breezy Bay Boxes out of Maine white cedar, staining them colors such as chestnut and pecan, and painting them with classic Maine images such as lobsters, moose, seabirds and pine cones. Most of the boxes sell for $18 to $21.
Rothweiler owns a printing and graphics business in Biddeford. When her brother, a carpenter, returned to Maine after living in Texas for a while, they decided to try running a small business together.
Why boxes?
“Everybody in my family is nuts about boxes,” Rothweiler said. “I’ve always collected boxes. My mother was a box collector. My grandmother was a box collector. And my brother had actually made some beautiful jewelry boxes back in the day, a lot more of a finished product.”
Eich makes the boxes with a bandsaw at his home in Alfred; Rothweiler decorates them.
The boxes are different from many others you see in one key way: Instead of lifting off, the lids are connected to the base with a dowel, and they twist open.
“You spin the box open. You don’t lift the lid off,” Rothweiler said.
One unusual model is the ladybug box ($25). The lid looks like ladybug wings, and each wing rotates open separately.
For now, Breezy Bay Boxes are sold on Etsy.com.
Come spring, Rothweiler says she plans to start selling them at outdoor markets.
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