Dad of Five Makes Crafts Bought Worldwide

Algis Kairys from Vilnius creates incredible woodwork. His main hobby is his artistically carved rolling pins, which he uses to roll out the dough and press the pattern onto the biscuits. The best part is that his five children are always there to help him.

Both a hobby and a job. It’s even more fun to learn that he is a father of five children, who, together with his wife Rūta, has raised or is still raising them.

Algis started developing his first products for sale in 2013. “In the beginning, we just made products and sent them to customers, but eventually there was a need to identify ourselves and the registered trademark “Algis Crafts” was created.”, for whom woodworking is both his main activity and hobby in one. Kairys came up with the idea of creating engraved rolling pins even before he started his business. “The idea was born a year before I started making them. When I saw cookies, I kept thinking, ‘What if it were possible to make cookies with a different pattern, would that be interesting?’,” he says with a smile.

It takes about half an hour to make one of these natural wood patterns. Customers use them not only for cookies or cake dough, but also for clay or modelling clay, thus creating inedible products. The rolling pins with tons of different engraved designs are mostly exported to the USA, Germany, France, the UK and Canada. Algis also offers cutting boards, solid grillware, drinkware and custom-made designs to your heart’s content.

“We are always thinking about going to fairs. It looks like a lot of fun, and maybe next year we’ll go to the Kaziukas Fair,” the man promises. When asked how he manages to juggle work and parenthood, Algis laughs that he would have to ask all five children. “It’s a matter of how you look at it, work doesn’t necessarily interfere with parenthood. One can be completely absent from work and not take care of the children, not find time for them. I think it’s a matter of character, attitude. The most important thing is to have the right balance between work, family and entertainment,” he believes.

He lets children into the workshop as much as they want, and there is never a shortage of work to do. Not only the production, but also the packaging of each item in a special box, the shipping, and the communication with the customers, all take time and extra hands. Although having five children may seem like a serious challenge to many, the father of a large family says that he never thought about the difficulties of raising so many children. “You have to imagine what it would be like if you had two or three, what it would be like then, but it’s too complicated and doesn’t make sense to think ‘what if’,” he says philosophically.

He enjoys the constant movement in the house, just like in the TV series “Friends”. “A full house. It’s fun, at one point there were a couple of kids away for a longer period of time, and others are somewhere else, so somehow there seems to be a lack of people, it’s too quiet”, he laughs. Of course, there are many children and many everyday worries, but he and his wife don’t strictly divide their work. “It’s just that we’re usually doing different things at the same time.”