Where Craft Meets Purpose.
A new chapter. The same standard.
Jeremy didn't set out to build a manufacturing company. He set out to make things.
It started the way most good things do — with someone who just wanted to build.
Jeremy Harris grew up around craft. He trained at CalArts in woodworking, mold making, metalworking, and fine arts. After school he went to work at Marimba One in Arcata — a small company that makes concert marimbas played on stages around the world. That's where he learned what it means to make something that truly performs.
He launched WoodLab Designs around 2011. No grand plan. Just a CNC machine, good materials, and the drive to see what was possible. What followed was fifteen years of figuring it out — hundreds of original designs, CO₂ laser systems, acrylic fabrication, a growing reputation for work that didn't cut corners.
That was the foundation. Blue Lake is where it found its purpose.
Blue Lake Rancheria didn't just offer a new home. They offered a bigger reason.
When Blue Lake Rancheria's economic development corporation came looking for a manufacturing anchor, Jeremy's shop was what they found. Blue Lake Tribal Manufacturing was formed — and with it came the resources to do something genuinely rare.
A Wood-Mizer LT70 bandsaw mill. An on-site negative pressure kiln. Logs sourced directly from tribal lands, dried on property, milled on property, and finished on property. From forest floor to finished product without ever leaving the Rancheria.
That level of traceability is almost unheard of at this scale. And it shows up in the work.
When the Rancheria's renovated hotel needed custom signage, they didn't order from a catalog. Jeremy's team built 350+ signs from wood salvaged from a falling barn on tribal property. Those signs are still there — and everyone who sees them knows the difference.
"We will not build inferior, low-quality product just to make a few extra dollars. That's not who we are."
— Jeremy Harris, Founder & COO
Blue Lake Tribal Manufacturing
One standard. No exceptions. The community holds us to it.
Jeremy is direct about how decisions get made here. That quote above isn't a mission statement someone wrote in a conference room. It's how he actually runs the shop.
And he doesn't run it alone. The maintenance team that works the property. The environmental department that surveys and cuts logs for the mill. The tribal council that backs the enterprise. BLTM exists because the whole community of Blue Lake Rancheria is behind it.
That changes what it means to spend money here. When you work with BLTM, those dollars stay local. They go back into workforce development, into ethically sourced materials, into a community that has committed to doing things the right way — even when the right way is harder.
That's not marketing. That's just what tribally owned means in practice.
Three companies. One roof. The same standard across all of it.
BLTM today operates three distinct companies. Different markets, different customers — but the same standard Jeremy has never compromised on in fifteen years of building things.