1337motif is Cameron Oehler from Indianapolis, IN. I am a woodworker who grew up helping out in my dad’s cabinet shop, and who now has branched off to create my own work. I originally started making my video game-inspired woodworking because I thought it would be super awesome to have a cutting board with a Space Invaders alien on it or a set of Tetris-shaped bookshelves, and when I posted pictures on this site, the requests poured in from around the world. After doing this part time for about two years, I have sold geeky cutting boards and other work to people on four continents and probably a dozen different countries. It’s been pretty exciting to see the interest people have in my work, and hopefully that interest will continue as I make new designs. I get asked all the time what the name 1337motif means…leave it to me to pick a name for my business that has to be explained to something like 80% of the population (but to that other 20%, it’s pretty great!). 1337motif is a play on words combining some geek lingo, “1337,” pronounced leet and a common mispronounciation of the word leitmotif, which is a recurring theme usually in music or literature. Feel free to read the exhaustively cited and researched wikipedia article about 1337, but to borrow from the article and sum up, the term leet (also commonly written as 1337) is used as an adjective to describe formidable prowess or accomplishment, especially in the fields of online gaming and in its original usage, computer hacking. In my case, the theme of geekiness recurs throughout my work and inspires many of my designs. Feel free to drop me a line at [email protected].
