Cornbread Customs in Springfield, Nebraska has been doing business for five years after getting started by a stroke of creative motivation and marketing brilliance. Hoan Dinh, one of the founders of Cornbread, got his start in woodworking at a cabinet manufacturing business after serving in the U.S. Army. Hoan enjoyed the cabinet work and was very skilled at it, but he was left desiring a higher income and a stronger outlet to pursue his creative passions.
So, he began taking wood scraps home from the cabinet shop to design and play around with. First, he started with guitars and cutting boards but wasn’t seeing the type of ROI he hoped for. Eventually, he began training himself on design and CNC work through YouTube and various other educational methods. Soon, he was spending hours upon hours after work perfecting his craft.
That’s when he thought to reach out to his old high school friend, Tony Bergstrom, who was working in signage and had acquired years of business knowledge in the industry.
“Hoan bought this CNC machine, nuts and bolts, just kind of out of a whim and maxed out all his credit cards. He was running a CNC at a cabinet shop, and I was doing manufacturing at a metal and plastic shop locally, mainly working on metal logos,” says Tony. “He was bringing this wood material home from work. One thing led to another, and we started making signage out of cabinet scraps, which is, of course, not your typical sign material either.”
This industrious, entrepreneurial mindset took Hoan two years to perfect before getting into a groove. The process of CNC design mastering took hours of daily collaboration between the two.
“I would come over and just hang out. I had never run a CNC machine before. I always ran plotters and printers. I was always manufacturing mostly signs, not cutting them,” says Bergstrom. “So I learned a little bit of how the machine runs and how to do it. For the first couple years, we really didn’t take a day off. He has three kids and a wife. But every day we were in the garage, if it was 15 minutes or eight hours, we always gave it a little bit of time.”
Once Hoan began to feel confident with his designing and CNC cutting skills, staining the pieces became the next goal to tackle.
“We had to come up with a way to stain the wood, and there’s not colored stain on the market. So that was kind of a hurdle is because we had to figure out how can we color the wood and match the pantones while producing a sign that looks exactly like a logo without printing,” Bergstrom. “That was the challenge. It was all experimentation. It was going through 18 reds to find that perfect bright crimson. Then, to make the stain easy to use was tough for us because there was a lot of stains out there that were too thick or too thin, or even too transparent. We just had to basically rely on trial and error to find that right formula that worked for us.”
After they got the operational strategies down, the next step for Cornbread Customs would be marketing. How were they to get their product in front of the right audience? They started targeting the local fire fighters and police, the fans of the local team (the Nebraksa Cornhuskers) and they eventually got a big catch with UFC president Dana White’s Howler Head bourbon.
White noticed their CNC-cut, custom stained signs because Hoan and Tony entered a contest to make a commercial for Howler Head bourbon and win a trip to Fight Island in Abu Dhabi.
“We initially made the sign for the Howler Head competition. We made a video of us making his logo out of our wood style signage. He saw it and was just really impressed,” says Bergstrom. “After that, Hoan had the idea to make one for White’s UFC-counterpart Joe Rogan. When we did, White said, ‘I’ll tell you what. I’m going give it to (Rogan) for you, and that’s the short story of how we got our sign inside of Joe Rogan’s podcast studio.”
Now, Cornbread Customs’ work is in front of millions of YouTube watchers and all the famous guests that enter the Joe Rogan Experience podcast studio. As for the interesting name of their business? That was also a result of the marketing brain of Dinh.
“Hoan wanted something that was easily memorable. So he was trying to think of a lot of different names. He thought that food, cornbread specifically, was just easy to remember,” says Bergstrom. “It has that handmade home kind of vibe. He essentially wanted something easy to remember, and so we were like, Cornbread Customs is easy to remember.”
Now that Hoan and Tony have made a healthy amount of sales and built up a large following on social media, the next step for the business is acquiring various licenses for sports and media designs.
“After a two-year relationship with the University of Lincoln, Nebraska, we got our full retail license with them. And one of our goals or objectives is to get more sports teams and expand our portfolio on that,” says Bergstrom. “We thought about the NFL, but the NFL is all one entity, so you pay for the licensing for all the teams versus each individual collegiate school. So, getting involved with pro football licensing is very expensive.”
As for the future, Tony and Hoan want to continue honing their skills and pushing wood-carved design boundaries to take things up a level. They started out self-taught and are now both certified experts in the carved signage realm with quite the handle on Instagram marketing. Check them out at @cornbread_customs_signs on Instagram, they have more than 34,000 followers and are going viral all the time!
