Former Labor Commissioner Brad Avakian Has Started a New Chapter: Antlers

In January 2019, Brad Avakian found himself with time on his hands.

A 16-year career in Oregon politics had come to an end with the close of his second term as state labor commissioner. It had been a memorable run, if one that detoured into the culture wars: Avakian will forever be linked to the Sweet Cakes by Melissa case, where he pursued a financial penalty against a Gresham bakery that refused to make a wedding cake for a lesbian couple. As he left office, Avakian began teaching business law at Willamette University and overseeing human resources at Clark College.

He also started collecting deer antlers.

Three years later, Avakian is the proprietor of DeerWood Designs. A lifelong woodworker, Avakian makes coat racks, wine holders and checkerboards out of antlers. He arranges them into flower baskets, which he dubs “plantlers.” His signature item: wooden tables made from live edge tree rounds, supported by an antler base.

“Nature’s ability to make something beautiful without any human involvement is really remarkable,” Avakian says. “I really give the deer a lot more credit than me.”

He goes through as many as 300 antlers each summer, all of them naturally shed by deer and elk in the

winter. Avakian finds some of them left by mule deer along creeks in the Coastal Range and Central Oregon. (“I am not professional shed hunter,” he demurs. “I am at best a novice having a nice day in the woods, hoping I find a few antlers.”) The majority come from white-tailed deer in South Dakota and Iowa. Farmers collect the antlers at their fence lines and ship them to Avakian in unincorporated Washington County.

Building a table from a Douglas fir trunk and white-tailed deer antlers can take three weeks, much of that time spent waiting for the finish to dry: “It’s a labor of love and a labor of patience,” Avakian says. Such a table sells for $1,200. Other pieces are more affordable: $70 for a hat rack made from maple with antler hooks.

Last week, Avakian set up a booth at the Oregon Country Fair in Eugene. He says plenty of people recognized him from his public service. The attention was positive—the politics of Country Fair-goers tend to match his record—but Avakian doesn’t think much of it. He’d rather talk antlers.

“The people who like the things that I make, I think it helps them bring a little bit of nature into their lives,” he says. “And that I do think is gratifying.”