Choose Your Pick-Me-Up

Allison Willford brings more than two decades of experience across art, creative work, retail, management, video production, marketing, and community building. She has also spent more than a decade working in real estate and real estate education. Together, those experiences give her a multidisciplinary perspective on the way she creates, works, and connects people and ideas.

That varied path has shaped the way Allison approaches her work. She looks beyond the obvious answer and sees connections between people and ideas that might otherwise be missed. She has a knack for turning possibilities into practical opportunities. Whether she is creating, building, coaching, or bringing people together, she is often asking the same question: What could we do with this?

For eight years, Allison also served as a foster parent, opening her home to and mothering several teenagers and young adults through very different stages of life. Her family included two siblings with developmental disabilities, a young mother and her baby, and a school-aged young man. Those experiences deepened her understanding of how differently people move through the world and the obstacles families encounter. They also reinforced the importance of meeting people where they are while helping them recognize what they are capable of.

Allison is the founder of Robert Edwin LLC, a creative and business umbrella built around bringing people, ideas, and opportunities together. She is building a growing family of companies and community-centered projects, including Village Gallery and Village Studio on S. Fourth Street. These spaces give people a place to create, connect, gather, work, experiment, and bring ideas to life.

Through Robert Edwin, Allison works across creative development, marketing, storytelling, business strategy, and opportunity coaching. Her Brainstorming gatherings give people room to explore ideas without the pressure of immediate commitment. Sometimes the first step toward something meaningful is simply having a place to talk it through.

Allison is also a licensed real estate agent with Move Real Estate. She brings the same people-centered, creative approach to helping clients find more than a property. She helps them find a place that works for the life they are building.

Her community work extends to Village Kind, a nonprofit initiative focused on removing barriers, strengthening independence, and creating practical, person-centered opportunities. The goal is to help people participate more fully in their communities, whether those communities exist in physical or digital spaces.

Pickle Pick-Me-Ups brings many parts of Allison’s life and work together: filmmaking, art, storytelling, humor, community building, and her belief that creativity can connect people and create opportunities for others.

At the center of Allison’s work is a simple idea: People are capable of more when they have access to the right people, spaces, resources, and opportunities.

Whether she is helping someone buy a home, develop an idea, build a business, create something new, or find their place within a community, Allison’s approach is rooted in curiosity, honesty, creativity, and action.

Ben Kissinger is a builder, developer, and creative technologist working across code, digital fabrication, performance, and multimedia projection-based installation art. He studied Theatre and Dance at Amherst College, a creative foundation that still shapes the way he thinks about collaboration, storytelling, movement, and making ideas tangible.

At Village Studio and Pickle Pick-Me-Ups, Ben makes the parts you can hold and the parts you click. He runs the 3D printing, creates the laser-cut files behind every pickle and plant stake, develops the tools that generate each unique design, and builds and maintains this website.

Ben’s love of procedural generation is what led to the randomness at the heart of the pickles. Instead of designing every variation by hand, he builds systems that combine forms, features, and personalities in unexpected ways, making each pickle its own small experiment in playful possibility.

He also builds internal tools and independent applications, and is excited about several upcoming releases: Cairn, an elegant note-taking app for programmers and anyone looking for a simple way to begin their work; Aural Architect, an app for creating your own binaural beats; Tesseract LFO, a multidimensional low-frequency oscillator; and Multidimensional Tic-Tac-Toe, a game that expands the familiar challenge into more dimensions. Each project reflects his interest in making complex ideas approachable, useful, and fun to explore.

Ben is autistic, and he values work that makes room for different ways of thinking, communicating, creating, and participating. He brings curiosity, focus, and a systems-minded approach to the work, whether he is solving a technical problem, refining a physical design, or helping turn an ambitious idea into something people can actually use.

He keeps the production side deliberately open. The machines run on plain, portable file formats such as SVG, so the work is not locked inside proprietary software and the tools remain understandable, adaptable, and useful to other makers.

Pickle Pick-Me-Ups brings together many of the things Ben cares about: creative collaboration, hands-on experimentation, playful technology, and building small points of connection that can make someone’s day a little easier.