Charles Tedder doesn't mind boxing himself in -- that's his specialty. He makes custom wooden boxes to contain such things as cigars, jewelry and golf balls. Over the past few years he's added dominoes boxes, tea boxes and boxes for decks of cards and poker chips. And then there are the containers for plain old stuff. "Everyone seems to love boxes," said Tedder, 63, who lives in Trinity, near High Point. "It's a place to store your treasures. And people love to rub them. They cannot resist."

Construction crew: Tedder grew up building things all over North Carolina. "My father was a minister, and he'd go to a town that didn't have a church and he'd establish one, build it and move on to the next town. He wanted to be as close to being a missionary as he could," Tedder said. "He'd build them from the ground up, and I was his helper, whether I liked it or not. When I was young I thought, I'll never work in wood."

From boats to boxes: Though Tedder spent 25 years working for boat builder Hatteras Yachts, he worked in quality assurance. Then he went into the antique furniture business, repairing and selling pieces. He still does some repair work.

It was the cigar craze in the '90s that drew him to full-time woodworking, though he'd always had a home shop and made things for friends and family. "A friend wanted me to build him a humidor," he said of the container that keeps cigars fresh. "Then he wanted more for his friends. Then his friends all wanted one. Then women started looking at them and thinking they were jewelry chests."

From there he decided to change his line of work again. "I'm a one-man shop. It's a lot easier to carry a humidor to a show than a big piece of furniture when I was doing furniture trade shows."

World of wood: Tedder's favorite part of the job is working with the wood. "I enjoy it tremendously," he said. "I love wood. ... From the smell of it to the look of it, it's absolutely a part of us, from the good Mother Earth."

He works almost exclusively with exotic woods and said he doesn't use any endangered woods. Some of his favorites to work with are cocobolo, in the rosewood family, and quilted sapele, from the African rain forest. He gets most of his supply from World Timber Corp. in Hubert near the coast.

Tedder gives every box several coats of a hand-rubbed oil finish, a blend he learned from his marine career. "I bring in the lumber, I grade it, I sand it, I finish it, I ship it. Usually I'm three or four weeks out on custom work."

Have a cigar: Humidors, boxes to hold tobacco products that maintain a certain level of humidity and temperature, are the trickiest to make, Tedder said. "You can make a box and make it pretty, but if it's not airtight, it's not a humidor. I hand-fit the lid -- it drops slowly -- and line them with Spanish cedar. The biggest compliment I get is that they work."

Huge humidors: Tedder also makes walk-in and free-standing humidors, including one for the Greensboro National Golf Club pro shop. "It's made with walnut and run by a computerized humidification system, with a glass top, so you can see what you want to get," said Tedder, a tennis player himself.

"I also built them 20 small humidors to sell in their shop that I made from the wood there when they cleared the fairway oak trees. Engraved on the top of the box was, 'this wood came from the No. 9 hole.' "

Brisk business: An early online retailer, starting a decade ago, Tedder says Internet sales now account for a third of his business and continue to grow. "What amazes me is people that don't know me find my Web site and plop down $400 for a wood box and give me their credit card."

As much as he enjoys the low overhead of e-commerce, he also likes attending shows. "I like meeting the people and talking to people. People might keep my card for three or four years and then place an order." He's a regular at Artsplosure in Raleigh every May, and at Lazy Daze in Cary in August.

Christmas is when he sells the most boxes, but graduation and Father's Day are also prime times. Despite the number of high-end boxes Tedder creates, he stores his treasures in less-expensive containers. "I can't afford my own," he jokes. "I still use the old cardboard cigar boxes I've had since I was a kid."

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