With a song and a cocktail, alumnus will assemble that dastardly bookshelf

Like James Bond, Charles Vickery ’09 (’10 MBA) has a tuxedo, a cocktail shaker and an alluring voice. But he goes one better. He has an allen wrench and he’s not afraid to use it.

This month Vickery launched an instant business assembling furniture or other gifts that arrive with strangely-worded instructions and enough odd bits of hardware to spark an emotional meltdown. But the San Francisco resident is no ordinary handy man. At $60 an hour he assembles whatever wicked things you’ve bought while singing operatic arias and mixing a cocktail of your choice. The tux is extra.

“Luckily I have three tuxedoes left over from my days in choir,” says Vickery, who took voice classes and toured with the choir as an undergraduate while earning a degree in leadership studies.

The business is still, um, building, Vickery admits. But within days of announcing his service on Craigslist, it drew coverage from the Huffington Post and the BBC. He is serious about making it thrive, though, saying consumers like personalized experiences, rather than just straightforward transactions.

And he’s optimistic about the holidays. Come Christmas Eve, says Vickery: “I will have my cell phone on.”