I didn't plan to become a CNC designer.
I'm Georgi, the person behind BFW Design. I build CNC designs from a small Bulgarian town in the heart of the Balkan mountains, backed by years of programming industrial machines and working directly with hundreds of makers, craftsmen, interior designers, and builders around the world.
My path toward CNC
Before CNC, I was a lot of things, but none of it stuck the way CNC did.
Waiter. Bartender. Car wash. Gas station. Construction worker. Auto body shop. Police officer. I wasn't lost just learning how the world works from the ground up.
In 2014, I started working as a builder for Hristo, the owner of the most modern chair and table factory in my city, with markets across Europe and the Middle East. He was looking for young people striving to learn and work as operators on his new CNC machines, and offered me a position in the factory, but I said no. I was studying web development and planning to move to Sofia with my wife to find work in tech.`
Then, a month before our wedding, he came to our home and offered me something different: CNC programmer.
My wife would follow me anywhere, but I knew she would be happier if we stayed in our hometown. So I said yes.
I knew nothing about woodworking or CNC machines. I started with the arrival of three Hapfo 5000 lathes.`An engineer named Bernhard came for two weeks of training. When he found out I had zero experience, he was visibly shocked. He told me that in Germany, becoming an operator on that type of lathe requires six months of training.
I had two weeks to learn how to operate the machine and make drawings for them.
By the end of the second week, he left me his personal contact. We stayed in touch for years. Months later I had improved dramatically, taught 2 operators how to work with the lathes and made my own style of preparing the drawings`
The Factory Years
What followed was years of programming production CNC machines, not one type, not one software, not one manufacturer.
Hapfo lathes. Homag machining centres. Bacci. Pade 5-axis robots. Longitudinal copy routers. Each with its own software, its own logic, its own quirks.
Alphacam. MegaCAD. WoodWop. E-Lab. Ujnze, Solidworks. Alongside the factory work, I was learning Aspire, Blender, Photoshop, and Illustrator on my own, building skills for the artistic design work that was quietly taking shape in parallel.
I became the only programmer in the factory who could run every type of CNC machine in the factory. The chairs and table catalogue includes more than 400 models, and I was involved in the design and development of a part of them, working from client sketches, photographs, and feedback through to full CNC production. I trained my two replacements and left in 2025
How BFW Started
BFW started as a joke.
In 2022, I uploaded my first design to Etsy: a Sun and Moon wall clock. It wasn't a business plan. It was personal. Me as the Sun, my wife as the Moon, and the number 13 encoded into the design.
Then came the Tree of Life clock I made for a close friend's family. They pushed me to start selling. I resisted for a long time. I had a young son, my daughter was on the way, and I don't take risks lightly.
But in January 2022, I uploaded that first clock. People started buying. Then they started writing to ask for help. Then they were asking me to build things that didn't exist yet.
By the time I’ve started BFW, my Etsy shop had reached 3,427 sales and 405 reviews with a 98% positive rating. The 2% who left negative reviews? Most of them never responded when I tried to help them fix their problem.
The Project I’m Most Proud Of
The project I'm most proud of isn't the biggest one by revenue.
In 2023, Angela Saxon commissioned a wall installation for the Traverse City Philharmonic Centre, a public building in Michigan, USA. People would walk by the artwork. I was really nervous.
The design itself wasn't the hard part. The challenge was making the pattern flow naturally from one wall to the next across a 90-degree corner, without the continuity breaking at the join.
I modeled it, produced the renders, and handed over a fully production-ready project. After installation, the names of the center's sponsors were inscribed across the waves
Everyone involved was very happy with the result.
The Project That Never Finished
Not everything works out.
A few years ago, I was working with a client on a large staircase panel, a continuous design running from the ground floor to the third floor of a private home. The wall wasn't flat. It stepped at different levels. The challenge was to make the design flow naturally across those breaks so you couldn't tell the wall wasn't even.
I solved it. The model was ready. We had agreed on everything.
Then the client disappeared. No response. Multiple attempts. Nothing.
I still don't know what happened. The work was done.
I tell this story not because it's dramatic, but because it happens. Not every project closes cleanly. What I've learned from the ones that didn't finish is the same as what I've learned from the ones that did: communicate early, ask the hard questions upfront, and put the work in regardless.
Files Are Only the Beginning
BFW exists because I wanted to give people more than just files.
A file is only the beginning. Getting it to actually run on your machine, in your material, at your size, with your software, that's a different story. I've seen what happens when people buy files from someone who didn't make them and can't support them. I've fixed those files for clients who came to me after the fact.
That's not what I want to build here.
Every design in the BFW shop is original. I made it. I can modify it, adapt it, and explain exactly how it works, because I've run the same workflows on production machines for years. The community, the custom work, the physical pieces: all of it is built around the same idea. You shouldn't have to figure it out alone.
If you have a CNC machine and you want to build something worth building, you're in the right place.
If you need a design built around your exact specs, machine, and material, custom work is how we do that.
If you don't have a machine but love a design, there's no better choice than getting it made by the creator.
And if you have a question and you're not sure who to ask, that's exactly what Creator Lab is for.