Meet  Jerry Channell! Jerry is a custom furniture designer and builder at Osleeper in Gainesville. He is married with three children.
We want to thank Jerry for spending time with us recently and telling us more about his life and love of Hall County. 

Please tell us a little bit about your family.

A: “I am happily married. My wife’s name is Megan and I have three kids. My oldest is Evelyn, she’s eight; Cami, she’s six; and then my son is Shepherd and he’s two.”

Q: Please tell us about your current career. 

A: “I’m a designer/builder. I own a company and we build custom furniture and design spaces.”

Q: When did you start your company? 

A: “2016.”

Q: Could you tell us about your business?

A: “OSleeper MFG Co, we design and build custom furniture and we design spaces, as well. So, if you need help designing a restaurant or a coffee shop or a brewery, we can help design it and then also manufacture the furniture needs. As soon as we move into our new shop, we’re gonna be working on having our showroom built out and then we’re going to launch a line of furniture as well.”

Q:What kind of lead you to go into design? 

A: “When I was at UGA, I worked at a custom cabinet shop there and fell in love with woodworking. I’ve always been a big woodworking nerd. Being there I got to meet a lady at this campus ministry I was working at and she asked me what I thought I was gonna do with my life. And I said, ‘I don’t know.’ She said, ‘I think God’s will for your life would be like a ven diagram, the world’s greatest need and your greatest passions where those overlap that’s what you need to be doing.’ And so for me, I just knew I liked helping people,  I liked being able to be around people, I liked seeing people’s desires when it comes to how they decorate their house and how they like present this spaces and how we can help with kind of building out cool stuff.”

Q: How long have you lived or worked in our community?

A: “I grew up in the Gainesville area and then went to UGA. After UGA, I moved to Texas and worked there for a few years and then moved back here in 2015.”

Q: What are a couple of your favorite restaurants in our community?

A: “I’m a big fan of Haydee’s, which is in Oakwood and Diletto. I think those two are some of my go-tos.”

Q: Who is the most interesting person you’ve met here in our community?

A: “There’s a lot of interesting people here. But I would say Chad Shore looking at his art, he’s very interesting guy.”

Q: If you could travel anywhere in the world right now, where would it be and why?

A: “Part of me that would like try not to be selfish. A selfish answer would be probably somewhere in like Alaska to do some cool camping and hiking and vacation type thing. And the social justice side of me would probably be like Ukraine or something like that to go and help.”

Q: What is one of your favorite movies? TV shows?

A: “Favorite movie would be ‘The Book Thief.’  Favorite TV show would probably be ‘The Office.'”

Q: What advice would you give to people?

A: “It’s super hard to step back and truly know like your own emotional well being especially in today’s culture, it’s easy to just kind of put a mask on and pretend like everything’s okay. If I give a short snippet of what advice would I give people it would be, ‘take time to become a more healthy version of yourself, become a more humble version of yourself, become a more emotionally mature version of yourself’.”

Q: What current or former local business makes you the most nostalgic about our community?

A: “I would probably say Atlas Pizza, it’s just good memories there.”

Q: If you could choose anyone that is alive today and not a relative; with whom would you love to have lunch? Why? And where locally would y’all meet for this lunch?

A: “I’m a big Joe Rogan fan. He just seems like he’d be really interesting to talk to.”

Q: What is your favorite thing or something unique about our community?

A: “I think my favorite thing is potential because I feel like Gainesville more than most communities, we have such a high ceiling for our potential and we’re definitely not to that ceiling yet. Having the local resources, having the people here that are pouring into the city to make it cooler, having the Greenway and having this really cool area that people are gonna want to hang out in being right here next to the lake. And of course, being close to mountains and there’s a ton of potential.”

Q: Where do you see yourself in 5 to 10 years?

A: “We just bought this building here in Midtown to move our shop into so we would love in five to 10 years to have more buildings that we can impact the community with. I hope that I’m able to, like I said before, be a more emotionally healthy, more humble and more mature version of myself in five to 10 years.”

Q: What is something on your bucket list?

A: “I have a quite extensive bucket list. There is one of the godfathers of American woodworking, his name is Sam Maloof, he’s dead now but he designed this really cool rocking chair, that’s super awesome, so one of my bucket lists is to build one of those. I’m really interested in timber framing, which is a type of building and construction method, so that’s on my bucket list to build a tiny home, timber framed. And then definitely a bucket list would be taking my family and doing a national parks road trip.”

Q: What is your go to band when you can’t decide what to listen to?

A: “I’m a big jazz fan, so I would say like the Ray Brown Trio, it’s like a not 35-year old person.”