Every business has a beginning, and for Apex Creations, ours started with two brothers who discovered that we really enjoyed making things.
Before Apex existed, Camren and I were interning with a friend of ours who was doing similar work. While we were there, we had the opportunity to work around CNC machines and get a feel for what it was like to turn raw materials into finished products. The more time we spent doing it, the more we realized that we genuinely enjoyed the work. Eventually, we started talking about what it would look like if we branched out and tried to build something of our own.
That conversation eventually became Apex Creations.
We officially founded Apex Creations, LLC in June 2025. At the time, we had a general idea of what we wanted the business to become, but there was still a lot we didn’t know. We knew we wanted to work with CNC and manufacturing equipment, create custom products, and eventually build a business around the things we enjoyed doing. What we didn’t know was just how much we were going to have to learn along the way.
One of the biggest steps we took came a few months later. In September 2025, we placed a large equipment order with an overseas manufacturer. The order was large enough to fill an entire 20 foot long shipping container and included some of the equipment that would become the foundation of our shop: a 2kW 5×10 fiber laser cutting table, a 2kW laser welder, and a 15kW rotary screw air compressor.
At the same time, we were also ordering other equipment that would expand what we could offer, including a 50W galvo laser, a 100W CO₂ laser, and additional 3D printers. The plan was to build a shop that could handle a wide variety of projects rather than limiting ourselves to one particular type of product.
Of course, there was one problem with that plan: most of our biggest equipment was coming from overseas, and we had to wait for it to arrive.
Rather than wait around, we started working with the equipment that we could get our hands on. We took delivery of several of the other machines we had ordered and immediately started experimenting, learning, and making products. At that point, we were figuring out a lot of things for the first time. We were learning the equipment, learning what products people wanted, figuring out how to price things, and trying to understand what it actually took to operate a small manufacturing business.
Our first real “hello world” moment came in late October 2025 at the Portland Fall Festival in Portland, Tennessee. It was the first show we had set up for and actually sold products at. Our product selection was pretty limited at the time, so we brought a few metal products but primarily sold wood and 3D printed items.
Looking back, it wasn’t a huge operation, but it was an important moment for us. We had gone from talking about starting a business to actually standing behind a table full of products that we had made and selling them to people in our community. It made the idea of Apex feel much more real.
Around the same time, we also got our first full size vendor space at Bloomin’ Deals in Portland. Having a permanent space gave us another opportunity to get our products in front of customers and, just as importantly, learn from what people actually responded to. We started figuring out which products sold, which designs people liked, what price points worked, and what we needed to change.
While all of that was happening, our largest equipment order was still making its way to us. After months of waiting, we finally took delivery of our overseas shipment in January 2026. Seeing that equipment arrive was a pretty significant moment for us. We had spent months planning, ordering, and waiting, and suddenly all of these machines were sitting in our shop.
There was still plenty of work to do before we could really put them to use. In February, our installation engineer visited the shop and helped us get the equipment installed and set up. We were finally able to start learning the machines that we had spent so much time preparing for.
The entire process of getting Apex off the ground came with a pretty steep learning curve. One of the biggest challenges in those early months was simply that almost everything was new to us. Every process, account, product, and piece of equipment seemed to come with something we had never done before. There were plenty of times when we had to stop, figure something out, make a mistake, and try again.
That’s probably one of the biggest differences between Apex when we started and Apex today. We have much more established processes and aren’t having to figure out absolutely everything for the first time anymore. We have learned how to navigate the day-to-day parts of running the business, and we have a much better understanding of our equipment and what we’re capable of doing with it.
We’re still not experts, and there is a lot we don’t know. But when we compare where we were when those machines first arrived to where we are today, we’ve made tremendous strides.
Apex has also grown beyond what we originally imagined. What started with an interest in CNC machines has turned into a business where we can work on everything from laser-cut and engraved products to custom signs, metal projects, fire pits, 3D-printed products, and other custom fabrication projects. One of the things we enjoy most is being able to take an idea that someone has and figure out how to turn it into something real.
That’s really where our motto, “From Vision to Precision,” comes from.
A customer doesn’t always come to us with a finished design or a perfect plan. Sometimes they simply have an idea. Our job is to take that idea, work through the details, and turn it into a finished product.
We’re still a young company, and we’re still figuring out where Apex Creations will ultimately take us. But we’re proud of how far we’ve come since those first conversations about starting our own business, and we’re excited about what we’re continuing to build.
There’s also a lot more to the story than we can fit into one article. We’ll be sharing more about the process of ordering our equipment overseas, getting a shipping container full of machinery into our shop, installing everything, learning how to use it, and the many lessons we’ve learned along the way in future Apex Journal posts.
For now, this is where the story begins. Thanks for being apart of our journey.
