About our business.
About the company
One Cardinal is the workshop of Colin Powell. After more than a decade of setting up computers and designing websites as a hobby, Colin has shifted to provide professional services to the small coastal communities of the Blue Hill Peninsula and Deer Isle. He has also fully embraced life in rural Maine, and has committed himself to running a small scale farm and selling at local farmers markets. The farm, however, is a newer project and will take some time to ramp up.
About Colin
Originally from Chicago, Colin moved to Maine in 2006 with is wife Emma Sweet and is otherwise occupied as a newspaper reporter for local schools and works the land on his farm, which was already dubbed Timberwyck when it was purchased in mid-2008.
About Emma
Emma Sweet grew up spliting time between the Boston suburbs and Castine, Maine. She helps Colin with graphic design elements, and fills in for his complete inability to use his hands to recreate physical objects in two dimensional images.
Fellows
We do not exist in isolation. One Cardinal can help many businesses with advertising and technology challenges. For more formal business advice, we recommend Meriby Sweet at Ropewalk Consulting. She has spent over two decades working to help businesses in a variety of sectors launch new products and re-market best-sellers, as well as develop business plans that help small businesses grow.
While I love to design clean, fresh websites and develop simple management tools, I am not a talented graphic artist. I highly encourage you to get in touch with Five Leaf Design Studio down in Appleton, Maine. He does beautiful work.
Commitment to local
When you work with One Cardinal, you are working with a company that believes deeply that a one dollar spent at a local business is fundamentally different from a dollar spent at a national chain.
The same idea applies to any other business or service. If you can find it locally, so much the better. Of course, local can be defined many ways. In practice, One Cardinal tends to like to stay close to home as much as possible. This means while we will consider work from anywhere, preference will be given to business located in the Blue Hill Peninsula and Deer Isle areas. Local cascades from there to neighboring regions, the rest of Maine, the rest of the U.S. and eventually the world. But again, we try to keep things close to home.
A dollar spent on your neighbor will return the favor sooner than one spent half way around the world.
Local agriculture
Perhaps the best example of the benefits of local comes from food production. Both Emma and Colin take seriously the ongoing movement towards local and sustainable food production. On our farm we try to grow much of what we need. What we don’t grow ourselves we buy from local farmers. As such, we believe philosophically in the small farm and the small farmer.