The making of OTOTO

Every story has to start somewhere, and things were no different with OTOTO. I will do my best to bring closer our history, our key principles when creating the brand, and what motivated us. As you might already know from the About us tab – we are brothers, so our path has many common denominators, but more about that later.

A brief trip into the past.

Nothing comes out of the blue; this is also true for our passion for plywood. The carpentry gene has been present in our family for many generations. The tradition of working with wood goes back a lot farther than our memory, but it was undoubtedly our grandfather Marian who was our greatest influence. It’s with him that we learned the trade during holidays in the countryside and slowly became infected with love for woodworking. Grandpa was considered the best expert in the whole area – he always had his hands full. These unique skills were also passed on to our dad who, like our grandfather, enjoyed a great renown and successfully undertook numerous carpentry jobs.

Our first contact with the carpentry shop was immediately transformed into passion. At first our age only allowed for attending to cleaning work, including the hated removal of ubiquitous shavings formed after processing. With time, we could do more, including working with machinery. That was when we began to treat our holiday

activities as a pleasure. We have actively participated in many interesting projects, from the production of window joinery to furniture, to the manufacture of several hundred meters of panelling, which was fashionable in those days. Unfortunately, neither of us undertook carpentry professionally, but it doesn’t mean that we have completely abandoned it. The passion just hibernated for a while. Our professional life took a completely different course. Przemo and his wife Marzena run the r-m studio architectural bureau, where their day-to-day-life is all about creating complete house and interior designs. Personally, life pushed me into the arms of trade in industrial machinery.

For a very long time, we were both totally immersed in our professional work, but woodwork kept marking its presence. With Przemo, it took the form of furniture which he designed for customers. As for myself, as a die-hard DIYer, I was constantly creating various pieces of furniture, decorations and garden arbours for personal use in my home workshop.

How did plywood come about in all of this?

My brother discovered this amazing material much earlier than I did because of his profession. On the other hand, I got acquainted with plywood thanks to YouTube while looking for inspiration for bedroom bedside tables. That’s when I actually learned how pleasant the material is and how many great opportunities it offers. And of course, my bedroom cabinets were ultimately made from plywood! Our fascination only deepened with time; Przemo often used plywood in his projects as well as in his flat for most of his furniture, while I was looking into its secrets on my own through trial and error.

Since then, it was pretty much downhill…

The idea of creating OTOTO was born during a sit-down Christmas meeting. We connected all the dots and it just happened by itself. Our passion for wood, fascination with plywood, design and business knowledge plus our dream to create something cool have caused that today, you are a guest on our website and you can discover the result of a long process of creating plywood furniture. Sharing our passion and knowledge, we want to provide you with a unique product that will serve as a functional decoration of your living space.

We hope you like the results of our work!