An expert in both carpentry and filming, and having a great intuition when it comes to marketing, Jēkabs Dimiters is a real 21st century carpenter. Four years ago he founded a brand called John Neeman Tools and began producing workman’s tools that soon became widely recognized throughout the world for their high quality and an image of a mysterious team of craftsmen behind Jēkabs’ photographs and short films.

After ten years in advertising and the film business, Jēkabs realized that the job lacked a concrete substance that he could hold on to. He wished to do a job that would make something essential, something that he could leave to his children. The idea to make tools came with a practical necessity: having begun building his own wooden house, the chisels he had turned out to be too small for the job.

Together with local blacksmiths he made replicas of historic carpenter tools, which were then deemed attractive enough to be sold on their own, and this was how the brand John Neeman Tools was born. Craftsmen working under the brand use carefully selected materials from around the world to make the best quality tools: Latvian oak and elm, Karelian birch, steel from Japan, Sweden, Germany, and Russia; an oak that spent millennia buried in English swamplands, black and hard as rock. Over time the production was expanded to include kitchen and hunting knives, leather bags and belts, bows, and even watches. To have a John Neeman branded tool customers are happy spend as long as one year on a waiting list.