Built from the shop floor up.
We didn't build Grainwork because we heard cabinet shops needed something better. We built it because we spent years inside those shops, on the floor, in the software, in the consults, watching how much the tools held good people back.
The frustration wasn't theoretical. It was accumulated. And the longer it built up, the clearer the path forward became.
This wasn't a startup idea. It was an industry pattern.
Where it starts for most things that matter.
Myron started at Wittmer Brothers and Stoll's Woodworking, high-end residential shops where the pressure to get good output on time was real. That's where the vocabulary came from: cutlists, CNC output, construction methods, the distance between what the design says and what the floor can build. You don't learn that from a demo.
Deep in the system most shops depend on.
From the shop floor into consulting, working one-on-one with shops to fix broken setups, untangle construction standards, write UCS scripts, and help teams get control of a tool they already paid for but still couldn't fully use. The pattern repeated across every shop: powerful software, real friction, too much depending on one person knowing how it worked.
Learning what it takes to build software people trust.
As a partner in a cabinet software startup, Myron worked across sales, marketing, onboarding, product development, and customer support. The biggest lesson wasn't technical. It was this: software only works when people can understand it, trust it, and adopt it. A tool that requires a specialist to operate is a tool that most shops will never fully own.
The pattern became undeniable.
Through Cabinet Explore, hundreds of consulting hours, a weekly newsletter for cabinet shops, and constant conversations with shop owners and production managers, the same friction kept showing up. Messy setups. Tribal knowledge. Weak handoffs. Too much complexity around the wrong things. Shannon joined to help build products and support customers, deepening the team's understanding of what shops actually need from their software.
All of it points here.
Grainwork is where the shop floor experience, the consulting pattern, the software development lessons, and the product thinking converge. Not a random startup idea. A decade of accumulated clarity about a real problem, and finally the right combination of team, timing, and tools to do something about it.
The tools finally caught up. The software didn't.
The cabinet software market hasn't changed in a serious way in over two decades. Not because the problems were solved. Because the barrier to solving them was too high. That barrier is gone.
The technology finally caught up.
Cloud infrastructure, modern development tools, and AI-assisted building have collapsed the cost and complexity of creating serious software. Things that used to require a large team and years of runway are now within reach of a small, focused team with deep domain knowledge.
The gap has never been more visible.
Shops are more connected, more informed, and more aware of what modern software looks like than ever. The contrast between what they use every day and what they know is possible has become impossible to ignore.
The shops are ready.
When Myron first wrote the manifesto, he didn't know if it was just him. Within days, shops wrote back: owners, designers, production managers, describing the same problems in almost the same words. None of them had compared notes. They didn't need to. The frustration is industry-wide, and the appetite for something better is real.
Principles we don't negotiate on.
The cabinetmaker should be in control of the work. Not the consultant, not the IT contractor, not the vendor's support queue. That belief drives the product decisions, the pricing, and the way Grainwork is built to behave when something changes.
Read the full manifesto →Software should adapt to the shop. The shop should not have to adapt itself to the software.
If we build it, anyone can use it.
The industry is full of powerful features that almost nobody ever actually learns, buried three menus deep, reserved for the one power user who figured out the workaround. Build something 95% of a shop will never touch and you haven't really added power, you've just added complexity. So that's our bar: if a feature ships in Grainwork, anyone in the shop should be able to pick it up and use it. Not just the specialist. Everyone.
An update should never break what works.
Plenty of cabinet software has burned shops by changing how things behave in an update. A parameter shifts, an old job comes out wrong, and you stop trusting the next release. We know things can still happen. Software is never perfect. But this is the one we treat as non-negotiable, so a large share of our work goes into testing and we build around it on purpose. The goal is simple: open a project after an update and it comes out the way you built it.
Straight talk, one honest price.
No salesperson quoting one shop a different number than the next. No marketing talk dressed up to sound impressive. One price, the same for everyone, and language that says what we actually mean. We'd rather tell you plainly what Grainwork does and doesn't do than sell you on a version that doesn't exist yet. Transparency isn't a policy here. It's just how we want to do business.
People who've done the work.
Grainwork isn't being built by people who spotted a market opportunity. It's being built by people who spent years inside cabinet shops and came out with a very clear idea of what needed to change.
Myron Wittmer
Founder & CEO · GrainworkMyron has spent more than a decade inside cabinet software. He started on the shop floor in a high-end residential shop, learning the craft from the bench up. From there he moved into building it: as a partner at Cabentry, he helped develop order-entry and pricing software for cabinet manufacturers, working across product, onboarding, and customer support. At 24, he was named to the Wood Products 40 Under 40, recognized by peers for bringing the mindset and experience of someone with twenty years in the field.
In 2023 he founded Cabinet Explore and went all in on the work that shaped Grainwork: sitting one-on-one with shops across the country, untangling construction standards, writing scripts, and getting teams in control of systems they'd already paid for but still couldn't fully use. He built a following doing it: a weekly newsletter, Tech-Forward Cabinetmaker, and a YouTube channel that thousands of cabinetmakers learn from.
After enough years of that, one thing became impossible to ignore: cabinet software has spent twenty-five years training shops to need somebody else. The world changed. Cloud, modern tooling, AI. Cabinet software mostly didn't. Myron would rather build the tool that removes the dependency than spend the next decade compensating for the ones that created it. That's Grainwork.
Shannon Fleagle
Partner · GrainworkShannon has worked in the cabinet industry for over ten years, and he's done it from every angle that matters. He started in a small shop building and installing cabinets. Real bench time, real job sites. He spent the last several years designing and drafting for a large production factory, learning what it takes to feed a CNC floor at scale and get parts right the first time.
In 2024 he joined Cabinet Explore, and the growth since has been remarkable. He's the kind of person who takes a hard problem, figures out the path through it, and ships the solution. Pair that instinct with a decade of shop-floor and drafting knowledge, and you get exactly the perspective Grainwork is built to protect: the question is never whether it looks good on screen. It's whether the output works on Monday morning.
That's why he's a partner in this. Grainwork needs people who've actually built cabinets and actually run the software, and who refuse to accept "that's just how it works" as an answer. Shannon is both.
If this resonates, follow along.
Get honest updates as we build. No hype. No pitch. Just the work.