Who We Are
Hi there! We are glad you are interested in meeting the Belina team. See that guy in the picture? That’s it, you’ve met the team. I’m Bojan Belina, and as you may have gathered I am the entire team at the Belina shop. Allow me to tell you a little bit about this humble one-person operation.
The shop is located in the Greater Toronto Area in Ontario, Canada. It’s a modest sized shop, large by hobyist standards but small by production standards. Large enough to wear out the soles of my boots moving from station to station but small enough that I have to maneuver around semi finished pieces at all times. Ultimately, it’s just the right size to be able to build any type of furniture but small enough to pay attention to the details. It’s in that Goldilocks, “just right”, range.
In practice, this means that I cannot manage to put out large runs of factory made pieces, and I cannot stock a varied inventory of ready-to-go items. It also means that every piece of wood passes through my hands, giving me the time and proximity to inspect it, fine tune it and put the time into making it right. It means that there is not a focus on quantity, but rather, a focus on quality.
If you’ve read this far, I hope that means you are interested in hearing more. Let me tell you a little about myself, why I do this and how I came about furniture making.
I belong to that early generation of millennials that was lucky enough to benefit from still having shop class available in school and I was a kid who seemed to excel equally in shop class as in mathematics. This meant that our wonderful education system told me to ignore the shop part of me and focus solely on the math and university, which I did. Predictably, I pursued a tech education and graduated into the IT field where I worked for many years. However, I could never shake the desire to work with my hands and somehow always found my way into DIY projects, home improvements, and ultimately into hobby woodworking. I was fortunate to be able to find space in Toronto’s maker comunity where I could pursue my passion for fine woodworking while maintaining my 9 to 5.
While my work was challenging and fulfilling, I had an urge to set off into the world and just simply make “real” things. I suppose it is the etheral nature of tech work that leaves one craving to leave a physical impact in the world. As a hobyist woodworker I was able to dip my toes into the world of making but the ideas and motivations flowed faster than my limited shop time allowed and I was quickly finding myself longing for more. Finally, as a global pandemic started to dramatically change the world, I decided that this was the right moment to dive into the deep and dramatically change my life by opening myself up to more time in the shop. The wisdom of the timing remains to be seen.
Ultimately, I felt that my passion for furniture making, my desire to make lasting items of substance, and my responsiblity to the fragile environment we live in could coexist in a venture that satisfied all those parts of me. This was the motivation that drove me to set up my tools and set of to find a way to make it work. I was fortunate to find partnerships that allowed me to create a space, a work flow and a supply chain that would allow me to do exactly what I set out to do.
I hope you share my passion and see the value and beauty in the practical objects that surround us each day. I hope that you too are seaching for objects with a sense of durabiulty and history. If so, I invite you to see some of my work.
