Fate & Dog Bowls: A Stamford Couple Builds a Life on Luck & Carpentry

There's a lot of opinions out there about fate. Some think it exists, others don't. Every now and then, though, a story surfaces that makes it difficult to make any sort of definitive statement against the idea.

Steve Simms met Catherine Jaouen (zj-OW-en) at CD's Cafe in Norwalk when she was visiting from France on vacation and he was about to leave for France to sing on tour with Serge Gainsbourg.He tried telling her this.

"She thought it was the biggest crock of [expletive deleted] in the world, because that guy was so famous," Steve laughs.

Simms would leave the states, Jaouen would stay, and they wouldn't hit it off. They wouldn't even cross paths again until four years later at another bar—him with friends after a job near the establishment, her dragging friends along from an hour away because she "hadn't gone there in a while."

This time, they were love struck. Today, they live in Stamford on a piece of beautiful land, between a well-known artist and a highly-connected zen master,  in a house that used to be a crack den before they worked so hard to create the home it is today.

Their story is full of big name celebrities, opportunities, talent and twists. But the most important factor is Steve's carpentry. A career in voice work he had to put on hold—a career path his brothers took to quite successfully—due to surgery on nodes.

"I couldn't sing anymore because of the surgery," Steve said. "[The doctor] said 'If you want to come get the surgery every year, then go ahead, keep singing. Otherwise, find something else to do for a living. Then [labor] opportunity presented itself."

"And you probably wouldn't have met me, either," Catherine reminds him. "I was young and coming from France on vacation, just trying to find out what I wanted to do with my life."

Getting into construction and remodelling with a friend who offered him a job, Steve began to learn the craft the would lead to .

"We started the crates in the mid-nineties," Steve said. "Somebody gave me a wooden wine crate and I made a feeder out of it for our last dog. Then Cathy saw it and said, 'You've got to sell these things.'"

Steve was, in the beginning, primarily selling the wine-craft contraptions whole sale to pet stores and out of liquor stores. Catherine was a whiz with the tech side of the business, and got them all set up with an online store front. Throwing herself into the online world, Catherine found her own niche and kicked off SEOPrimo.com

Steve was already doing home renovation jobs under , but Whiner & Diner took on a life of it's own. They started turning out orders all over the place. People loved them. After a mention in the New York Times, site hits exploded.

"We got tens of thousands of hits once when they'd written about our website in the New York Times," Steve said. "Wow, that was huge. It wasn't even a story about us, it was about Microsoft—we were using them for our website—and just a mention of 'websites like WhinerandDiner.com,' didn't say anything about us or what we sold, and we got tons of hits. Oh, wow."

Catherine said, on a good month, they'll turn out about 20 pieces of product, but usually, the average is around 15.

"It's always fun," Steve said. "Generally speaking, sometimes it pays the mortgage. We're not looking to retire off it, but it's a nice side job, a nice little cottage industry."

The elevated bowls they make come in a variety of sizes, even extremely tall bowls at 27-inches for dogs like Great Danes. They are hand-crafted and, if it is so desired, hand-painted.