1 in 8700: Mike Rainville

Mike Rainville’s woodcraft has received various different awards and amount of press throughout his career. The most recent plaque he’s received is the prized 2014 Vermont Woodworker of the Year given to him by the Vermont Wood Manufacturer’s Association. He also won the Vermont Design Competition for a wooden rocking horse (the largest toy the company currently sells) several years ago. In fact, the plaque for both awards was cut, sanded and decorated right in the very woodshop they currently stand in.

Mike Rainville is the owner and founder of Maple Landmark Woodcraft, a   company he started in 1979 as a 15 year-old boy that became the largest wooden toy company in the country.  “I like making lots of small things”, Mike responds when asked about the products he makes.  The company sells everything from wooden raddles to cribbage boards cut in the shape of Vermont.

The shop itself is very authentic.  As soon as you walk in you are only several feet away from the actual workroom where you can watch as the operators conduct incredible looking machinery.  The store is decorated with gimmicks and small toys made for children, the most popular being the well-known “Name Train.”  A “Name Train” is a series of wooden letters, each sitting on a pair of wheels and attached together by magnets.  Each letter can be connected to move together like a train.  The College Store currently displays their name train behind the checkout counter.  Fittingly, it is painted in Middlebury blue.

What is most impressive about the wooden toy empire that Rainville has created is not so much the mass amount of woodwork itself but the savvy business risks he took and capitalized on to make the company what it is now.  Mike started Maple Landmark Woodcraft by selling his products in the Gift section of his parents’ General Store in Lincoln.  His childhood hobby transformed into a semi-serious business when it started to make money as he sold his knickknacks to a sundry goods salesman and at a Craft Tent at the Field Days County Fair. He didn’t finalize the name Maple Landmark Woodcraft until after college.  The name for his company was inspired by his family’s farm in Lincoln, Maple Landmark Homestead, which still exists today.

Mike was wary when it came time to look at colleges, knowing that he wanted to be close to home where his business was taking off.  Intrigued by a booklet for Clarkson in his school’s Guidance office (a name he only recognized as being an opponent of the UVM hockey team in previous winters), he decided to thumb through the pages to see what the school was about.

“There was an interdisciplinary industrial distribution page on the back and as I looked through it, for every single course on that listing I thought ‘Yeah I could use that!’… It was a great program.  I ate it up.  I completed it all in three years … I was just there to get an education and I’d come home on the weekends some.  It was a bit of a haul!  It was fun.  It worked out - I wasn’t sure it was going to work out.”  Mike laughs at himself now.  Really though, he’s not exaggerating about not wasting any time.  Mike and his family started laying the foundation for his new shop in between his last college exam and graduation.  “It was a heavy load but I really liked the stuff I was taking and I had a direct application for it.  I could take accounting and know what that would mean to me.”

After graduating college in ’84, Mike began diversifying his business.  He would acquire mostly small, one-man companies in Vermont that specialized in a certain wood product - such as wooden blocks or wooden games.  In 1987 Mike bought Trolls Toy Woodshop, a company that sold wooden letters on wheels.  It was from this original concept that Maple Landmark Woodcraft improved the idea and created the soon-to-be iconic “Name Trains.”  Business took off in 1994 after Maple Landmark Woodcraft became the first company to successfully commercialize the “Name Trains.”

The next big acquisition for the company didn’t come until 2001 with the purchase of another longstanding Vermont wooden toy company, Montgomery Schoolhouse.  The Montgomery, VT based company company sold mostly wooden toys for infants - an area Mike’s company didn’t have specialty in yet.

Mike has kept this mindset of improving on other products and adapting products for the current market.  Almost two years ago Maple Landmark Woodcraft introduced their newest item - silly sticks.  Silly sticks are long wooden sticks with glasses, mustaches and other accessories attached to the end of them.  Mike claims that in the “selfie” era the idea has been vastly successful with the company selling tens of thousands of them.   The company, however, hasn’t made any new acquisitions in the last 12 years, mostly because they now control most of the market.

While the demands for certain products have altered since Mike began his career, so has the development of technology. “Take the cribbage board example” Mike begins, “when I first made cribbage boards … I would physically drill each hole. They weren’t all straight and they weren’t all in straight lines.  I would take some flack for that.” He laughs at himself again. “Now we have a C&C router where it’s all off a computer program.  You just lay wood down and it just punches holes.  All of them perfectly straight, spaced and in line.”

However, the new technology has only helped increase job opportunities for the company.  Mike has a team that  includes graphic designers, sales managers, computer programmers and area supervisors.
Maple Landmark Woodcraft still remains heavily rooted with Rainville family members.  Mike’s wife, Jill, is the office manager and handles customer service; his sister, Barbara does marketing and he just hired his oldest son full-time after he recently graduated from the same program Mike completed at Clarkson.   Even Mike’s mother and grandmother do work for him around the shop.  Mike still lives in Lincoln where he raised two sons with his wife Jill.

Being in the business as long as he has, Mike is clearly very deserving of the 2014 Woodworker of the year.  He has dedicated 16 years on the board of the association that named him to the honor and half of that time as President.  Rambling through the multitude of commitments he has had in his lifetime, he says that at one point he was on seven different boards.  Over the years his board memberships spread variously from the board at St. Mary’s School to the board for Working Lands Enterprise with the State.
Mike is very humble and modest.  You can tell he takes pride in his work and in doing it well.  Mike, who was born and raised as a Vermonter, loves his home. The wood used to make his products all come from Vermont timber. The Vermont Woodworker of the year award was nicknamed the 2015 “Plaid Shirt” as an ode to his signature Plaid shirt style, which Mike claims could also have been the “plaid shirt and khakis award.”   So don’t be shy  — throw on your plaid shirt, check out Mike Rainville at Maple Landmark Woodcraft and buy that silly stick!