Graham was staring at a pile of leftover wood when he saw half a bow tie. That’s the origin story of SwitchWood, the Dairy Block brand born from a sculptor’s instinct to never waste a scrap. Drew started his career as an artist in Washington, D.C., carving sculptures that left behind piles of offcuts. One piece, too small for anything grand, looked exactly like one wing of a bow tie. So he fashioned a magnetic centerpiece to join two wings together, and an interchangeable accessory brand was born. It took a year of development and dozens of prototypes, including a scrapped injection mold, before Drew filed a trademark in 2014.
The bow tie remains a SwitchWood signature: interchangeable wooden wings snap into a single knot, turning one tie into a whole wardrobe. But it’s the polarized wooden sunglasses that pay the bills. “It wasn’t that they were successful,” Drew says. “It was how quickly they became the product people associated with SwitchWood.” Unlike bow ties, the shades work for just about everyone, every day, and quickly became the brand’s bestseller.
From there, Drew kept experimenting, adding wood-and-steel watches, pocketknives, golf accessories, and newer pieces pairing wood with carbon fiber. Most are designed and built in-house at his Denver studio by a team of three. “Everything starts as a fun experiment,” he says. “If I’m not excited about creating it, it’s probably not something I should be making.”
His current favorite lives on the wrist. SwitchWood creates one-of-a-kind watches with dials cut from vintage concert tickets, backstage passes, and tour memorabilia, essentially tiny time capsules for the live-music obsessed. “A watch is much more than something that tells time,” Drew says. “It’s a functional piece of art.” That same thinking runs through collaborations with Jack Daniel’s, Mount Vernon whiskey, and even the U.S. Capitol, each using materials that arrive with a story of their own.
Next on the workbench are hand-carved sculptures that quietly open to reveal a hidden watch inside: part art, part accessory, entirely SwitchWood. With shops at Dairy Block, The Source Hotel, and in Breckenridge, Drew isn’t chasing mass production. He’s chasing the next thing you can’t find anywhere else. Thirteen years after spotting a bow tie in a scrap of wood, he’s still looking at leftover materials and wondering what else they might become.
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