Calico Joinery · Edinburgh
Alex Shiell
Founder of Calico Joinery
Alex founded Calico Joinery with a simple idea: customers should be able to expect the same level of communication, organisation and professionalism from a building contractor that they would expect from any other well-run business.
About Calico
The Idea
Building Calico differently
Alex founded Calico Joinery in Edinburgh after years working within the trade and seeing how often customers were left frustrated — by poor communication, unreliable scheduling, unclear pricing, inconsistent service and trades operating without proper systems.
The thinking behind Calico was straightforward: a building company should be run like a proper company, not simply as an individual tradesperson moving from one job to the next.
Good workmanship alone was never going to be enough. Calico was set up to combine craftsmanship with communication, organisation, accountability, respect for the customer's home, clear project management and genuine reliability — the things a customer actually experiences, not just the finished joinery.
The Story
Where it started
Alex left school at 15. Rather than following the conventional academic route, he actively pursued a career in joinery, contacting large numbers of companies in search of an apprenticeship.
He studied carpentry, joinery and construction management, then built experience through several roles and apprenticeships within the trade. Those years exposed him to both the good and the bad of how construction businesses are run — the standards that earned loyalty, and the habits that lost customers.
He also spent time in customer-facing and leadership environments outside the trade, which shaped how he felt customers deserved to be treated long before any tools came out.
Alex didn't start Calico simply to become self-employed. He returned to building and joinery with a clear intention: to create a company that operated to a higher standard than the one he'd spent years working within. Calico Joinery grew out of that idea.
The Early Days
From the first job onwards
In the early stages of Calico, Alex sent out around thirty quotations without winning the work.
It would have been easy to read that as failure. Instead it forced him to understand how customers actually make decisions when it comes to building work.
He realised that selling a renovation isn't simply about giving someone a number. A customer is trusting someone with their home, with a significant amount of money, with disruption to their daily life, and with the quality of something they may live with for years.
That shaped how Calico quotes, communicates and delivers projects from that point on.
The Standards
What Calico is built around
Reliability
Turn up when agreed, communicate changes and treat people's time seriously.
Communication
Customers should understand what is happening, what something costs and what happens next.
Respect
A customer's property is their home before it is a building site.
Accountability
If Calico takes responsibility for a project, Calico remains responsible for managing it properly.
The Ambition
Building more than a joinery business
Calico has grown beyond isolated joinery jobs into projects involving multiple trades, renovation work and coordinated property improvements.
Alex's long-term ambition is to build Calico into a highly respected Edinburgh property and construction company — with the systems, standards and customer service to scale without sacrificing quality.
Where a project requires additional trades, Calico works with trusted subcontractors and specialists, managed under the same accountability customers expect from the rest of the work.
The aim isn't to become enormous. It's to carry the ambition and systems of a larger contractor while keeping the accountability and accessibility of a local company.
Calico Community
A business should contribute to the place it works in
Calico Community exists to carry out small, practical improvements for people who may struggle to get work done themselves — including elderly, disabled or financially vulnerable members of the local community. It's part of how Alex thinks about what the company should become as it grows.
Read about Calico CommunityGood workmanship should be the baseline. What separates a great contractor is everything that happens around it — communication, organisation, reliability and taking responsibility for the finished job.
Alex Shiell
Founder, Calico Joinery
Get in Touch
Planning a project?
Whether it's a smaller joinery job or a larger renovation, you can speak directly with the Calico team about what you're planning.