Our Story

I spent most of my career designing the things musicians plug in. Headphones at Bose. Audio hardware at Samsung. Years of thinking about how a device sits in your hand, where your thumb lands, what angle a screen needs to be readable without looking down.

Before any of that, I grew up in my father's shop in East Tennessee. He was a woodworker, the one people there went to when they wanted something built right, and I learned the craft the way you learn it at that age: by sweeping, then sanding, then finally being handed a chisel. I've kept it up my whole life. Furniture, restoration, refinishing, whatever the house needed.

Somewhere in there I fell for synthesizers.

And every synth I bought had the same problem: it sat flat on the desk. Screen facing the ceiling. Knobs at the wrong angle. The stands you could buy were bent steel or laser cut acrylic, fine as hardware, wrong for a room with a good table in it.

That bothered me more than it should have. A studio is supposed to be a place you want to be in. It's hard to feel creative when the gear is fighting you and the room looks like a server closet.

So in 2020 I put the two trades on the same bench and started making the things I wanted for my own room: ergonomic, thoughtful, beautiful, reliable. The product designer works out the angle, the clearance, the screw pattern. The woodworker cuts it from a board my father would have approved of. Noizzi is what that produces.

Every piece still starts in the same workshop, about an hour north of Atlanta. Cut from a single board where I can, so the grain runs continuously. Hand cut joinery. Nothing stained; the color is the tree. Walnut by default because it's my favorite; oak, maple, and the occasional wenge or rosewood board when I find one worth it. A hardwax oil finish that feels like wood, not plastic. Nothing is stocked. Your order is cut when you place it.

The goal is the same one I had in the headphone studio: make the thing that gets out of the way, so you can play.

James
Noizzi Hardwood · Flowery Branch, Georgia