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Cook Woods, a Klamath Falls-based, family-owned company mills exotic and domestic woods, and rare hardwoods, into specialty products for use by hobbyists, wood artists and instrument makers. Sustainability drives every part of the business. Having grown up in national parks as the son of a park ranger, founder Christopher Cook seeks to “have a light…
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by Damon Runberg You may have heard this story before. Bend was a timber town, but after the demise of the timber industry, the regional economy shifted to tourism to replace those timber jobs. The vast ponderosa forests outside of town attracted mills that sustained the town for much of its history. The present location…
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Grant D. Forsyth, Ph.D., Chief Economist for Avista gave a riveting talk at the November, Medford Chamber of Commerce Forum to over 200 business people. The title of his talk was “Economic Outlook: It’s Complicated”. He presented several slides to prove his title to be true. Our Economy in Southern Oregon is complicated. He started…
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By Jim Teece We are getting quite a few requests about the photo on the cover of the November 2019 issue. We received the photo as part of a press release package from the Obie Companies talking about retail on 5th street marketplace and we thought it was very appropriate to have as the cover…
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By Jenny Ulum, Public Affairs Counsel, Obie Companies – www.obiecompanies.com The best place to find a little piece of the North Pole in Eugene is the historic 5th Street Public Market in the downtown Market District. Year-round the 5th Street Public Market is one of the area’s top tourist attractions, drawing visitors and locals alike…
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By Jim Teece Retailers have closed a record 102 million square feet of store space in 2017, then smashed that record in 2018 by closing another 155 million square feet, according to estimates by the commercial real-estate firm CoStar Group. Then they started 2019 by announcing more than 8,600 store closures. Look at this list…
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By Jessica Nelson from the Oregon Employment Department Oregon had almost 66,000 retail salespersons in 2017 – making retail sales the largest single occupation in the state. One out of every 31 jobs in Oregon is in retail sales. Those tens of thousands of jobs are grouped together based on work activities, and while the…
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Inspired by communities from Bend to Boulder, management consultant Cynthia Scherr and financial consultant Linda Ganim, along with other local entrepreneurs, started E2E three years ago. They challenged their friends and clients, most of whom own businesses, to come together as a loose group of entrepreneurs to focus on promoting, developing and enhancing a sustainable…
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Learn to Live – a TEDxAshland Talk Trever Yarrish and I had the opportunity to present at the first TEDxAshland in May. Our “Learn to Live” talk focused on a new idea we have for applying agile principles that we both use everyday in our own software companies, to your own personal education. We spent…
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