StoryWood Wearables

Ali Muhammad

Ali Muhammad is an award-winning entrepreneur and business owner, and is the founder of Storywood Wearables. This business venture was conceived in the Samuel Plato Academy for historic restoration and preservation, a trade program at the African American Heritage Center. While learning the skills necessary to renovate historic buildings, Ali began using historic woods from project houses to hand craft different items. Later through an internship at the Internship Academy, Ali worked at a local makerspace giving him additional skills in AutoCAD, CNC machines, laser cutters, and more. With Startup Weekend around the corner he narrowed down his idea to handcrafting wooden bowties from historic buildings and doing archived based research to tell their stories. With woods from Whiskey Row on Louisville’s Main Street, Secretariat’s barn, Man O’ War barn, and a deal with the Louisville Slugger Museum to use reclaimed bats, his inventory is expanding and is now found in over 14 stores. Ali went a step further by hiring the University of Louisville history department to do archived based research on the sources of all of the wood he uses. Ali has also build amazing ties to the smoke town community through YouthBuild and Community foundation, Ali has mentored many students from the YouthBuild program as well as connect those who had not heard or knew the steps to take to get started. He plans on building a in the with the Project through Community foundations to help people with creativity and ideas in the area use some of the same tools that help him build his company!