20 Years and 2 Containers
She was a contemporary artist with a gallery in Pittsburgh and I was a software guy working for Seimens in their corporate research group. I was traveling a lot at that time and thought maybe I could introduce her to other galleries, so I planned a vacation to India.
This was in the late 90s when stuff wasn’t really online, so we didn't have many leads going in. It made the process a bit more challenging, but also much more adventurous. We started wandering around just talking to people to see what we could find, and one conversation always lead us to the next until often times we'd find ourselves being invited over to strangers' homes for dinner.
I came away with a much more rewarding travel experience than I ever had and it got me thinking
I would love to just spend my life traveling around the world trying to find cool things and in the process meet people, learn about their techniques, and support myself doing that rather than this IT crap.
20 years later I was in the process of divorce, trying to figure out what my life was going to look like. One day I said the hell with it I'm going on a trip and called my childhood friend Evan Bennett and said "Evan, we're going to India."
Evan had never even been outside of Pennsylvania so I knew no matter what, it would be another adventure. My thought was I'll buy a couple cool pieces and bring them back. Two containers later... we needed a place to store everything, so we had to get a warehouse.
Next thing I know I’m in the furniture business.