Thirty-five years of building things people love.

Tovaka is the studio of Michael Kennett: builder, designer, and founder based in Portland, Oregon. The word means builder, and that is the whole story.

Michael has been making things since he left home at sixteen. He has built sacred spaces in the mountains of Colorado, toured as a drummer and sound engineer, co-founded one of Portland's most famous marching bands, and spent over a decade designing physical spaces guided by Christopher Alexander's pattern language: the idea that spaces come alive when they have a center, and feel dead when they do not.

In 2011 he gutted a Silver Streak travel trailer and turned it into a Venezuelan street food cart. That cart became TEOTE, one of Portland's most beloved restaurants and the #1 mezcal seller in the United States. He designed the brand, built the spaces with his own hands, and ran it for thirteen years. People did not just eat there. They got married there. They tattooed the logo on their bodies.

That is the thing Tovaka brings to your business: the difference between a company people use and a company people love is design. Not decoration. Design in the deep sense: knowing what your business is actually for, finding its center, and building everything else around it.

Today the tools are different. Modern web stacks and AI let a studio of one move faster than agencies of twenty, at prices a small business can actually afford. The standard has not changed: build things that matter. If they matter enough, they sell.