Despite being cold-blooded, reptiles have been nothing but helpful to Calgarian Greg West. They've allowed him to work his dream job, appear on Dragons' Den, and even landed him his own TV series. In return, West, the founder of local terrarium company Cornel's World, builds stunning, large-scale reptile homes with themes ranging from Japanese pagoda to Western bar.
My favourite build is one that was Bill and Ted inspired that we did for a comic book shop in Edmonton. It looked exactly like the phone booth in the movie. We had a lot of the scenes from the movie incorporated into the interior, which actually spun around 360 degrees, so you could always be looking at something different.
From hobby to business
West, who grew up with various reptiles as pets, started designing his own terrariums when a job at a glass company gave him access to the materials he needed. People began asking for his handiwork, and his hobby became a business in 2013, when an appearance on CBC's Dragons' Den inspired him to dive in full-time.
Filming Scaled
TV came calling again when a casting company emailed in 2017 asking if they would be interested in filming a series for Animal Planet. The show, Scaled, follows the builders creating one-of-a-kind habitats for every style of cold-blooded critter, from boa constrictors to monkey-tailed skinks.
While West says filming was a great experience, it also put a lot of pressure on him and his team. For the five months they filmed, builds that would normally take a month or more had to be finished in weeks. "We would be filming from nine until seven each day, and once we were done filming we had to actually work. We didn't have a shadow team working through the night for us," says West. "So a lot of late nights, a lot of missed family time. It wasn't easy by any means."
After the show
All that work paid off: the exposure has more than doubled sales and created months of backlog as orders from fans pour in. Cornel's World has even had celebrity orders, like the Jurassic Park and hockey-themed terrarium built for former NHL player Brad Stuart, whose son is a fan of the show.
West says it's still unusual when people stop him to ask for an autograph, but he's happy his work has made an impact. "The one thing that I thought was really cool about the show is how many people have reached out to us that have never had a reptile and have now gotten into reptiles," he says. "It's really cool to see the end result and realize that there is a fan following."
In the print edition
Read the original article on Avenue Calgary
Plan a custom build
From a phone booth to a pagoda, tell us the idea and we will build the habitat around your animal.
