We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Eric Staves and Trent Eisfeller. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Eric & Trent below.
Eric & Trent, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Often outsiders look at a successful business and think it became a success overnight. Even media and especially movies love to gloss over nitty, gritty details that went into that middle phase of your business – after you started but before you got to where you are today. In our experience, overnight success is usually the result of years of hard work laying the foundation for success, but unfortunately, it’s exactly this part of the story that most of the media ignores. Can you talk to us about your scaling up story – what are some of the nitty, gritty details folks should know about?
Building our business up has been quite the journey, to say the least. We literally started the company out of our driveway almost 6 years ago. Initially there was no real strategy to what we were doing. It evolved out of us building our own bed frames due to the lack of storage we had in our house at the time. They weren’t very pretty, they didn’t even have a proper finish. However, they were sturdy and solved our storage issues, which then gave other people ideas to ask us if we could help them. Slowly but surely, we found ourselves helping friend after friend with each of their individual furniture needs.
So as we continued to help out friends we slowly started to realize we needed to upgrade our tools and equipment and most importantly, increase our prices! In the beginning, we weren’t really making any money. We mainly just charged people for the cost of the materials and maybe would walk away with a few bucks to buy ourselves a six pack. Every few weeks we would buy a new clamp we needed or drill bit or saw blade in hopes it would solve all our problems during builds, but inevitably, we came to realize our biggest issues we came up against were our shop space (our very uneven driveway), and how to charge our clients a fair, but profitable price for the work we were doing.
After about 4 years of struggling to fabricate furniture in the elements, we knew we needed to not only expand, but we desperately needed a roof over our heads and tools. This was truly one of the hardest parts of our journey in scaling up our tiny business. Finding a decent workspace in the city of Los Angeles that is not only affordable, but fit for the type of equipment and work we do, was incredibly hard to find. There is a common misconception that if you find a industrial space, you can run any type of fabrication business out of said space. Actually getting to know your landlord and being clear about the nature of the work you do on a daily basis is paramount. We’ve heard horror stories of woodworkers, metal workers and ceramicists moving into a dream shop space only to discover that the landlord didn’t understand the level of noise and mess created by the maker and were abruptly forced to start the search all over again. We literally walked the streets of Jefferson Park looking at abandoned spaces for rent. We called dozens of places and were laughed off of the phone as soon as we said we were woodworkers or that we couldn’t afford anything over $3 per sq/ft. Finally, after searching for months, in March of 2022, on a very gloomy day, we stumbled across a craigslist add for an artists incubator space in Ramona Gardens. The best part was that the add had been posted only 20 minutes ago. The next day we got there early, eager and excited to seal the deal and finally move our equipment out of the driveway and find our forever home for the business. We were able to acquire a small shop space of about 215 sq/ft for about $650 a month. At the time, it was a big jump, but we trusted our work ethic and that with upgrading our work space, we would be able to be more productive, provide a high quality product and charge what we felt we were worth to not only pay our rent but to also turn a profit. The next year was very fruitful in expanding our reach, our clients, our network of returning customers and upgrading our equipment. We had even started to dream of finding a larger shop space, but we were happily growing in our current shop space and wanted to take another year to grow our savings. Unfortunately, we found ourselves in a situation that happens all too often to small businesses . . . The owners of the building decided to sell. Over 20 small businesses were now forced to start looking for new homes. We were gutted, blindsided, pissed, depressed, burnt out, but at the same time we found motivation to now find a bigger, better space that would match the scale of our growing business. We were back to the grind of looking for shop spaces. We were on constant phone calls, we looked at probably 10-15 different spaces all over the city and we were striking out on all of them. Thankfully a few months later, we were able to secure a new 500 sq/ft space for around $2 per sq/ft! We’ve since moved, and now are in the very exciting stage of simultaneously working on larger scaled jobs and installations while building out our new shop!
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
Breed Street Customs was born out of solving problems. We call ourselves woodworkers but a more accurate description would be furniture fabricators. We work with not only private clients to design and fabricate their dream furniture, but we also work with interior designers to execute on large scale build outs such as, office built in’s with custom storage solutions, kitchen cabinetry and pantry solutions, entire wall length bookcases and media consoles of all shapes and sizes. At the same time, being wood enthusiasts (we’ve even been called wood nerds, and we took that as a compliment) we pride ourselves on keeping off cuts to make smaller items such as cutting boards, coasters, catch-alls and rolling trays, all made with knowledge of which species of wood serves that item the best. What we feel truly sets us apart as a custom furniture business is our consultation and design process. We take the time to customize every aspect of the design with the client or designer, down to what species of wood, the finishings, style, everything. It’s always an open conversation to come to what will work best for our clients. I think seeing people’s faces after we’ve solved their problem is what makes us most proud and keeps us excited to come to work everyday. The root of what we do is simple, we help people solve a problem they feel like they wouldn’t have been able to without us.
We’d love to hear about how you met your business partner.
We met in the fall of 2009 when we both started attending DePaul University in Chicago. We started chatting and quickly bonded over sports. Due to the nature of our major, we spent a ton of time together and we’ve been extremely close ever since. It wasn’t until we both moved out to Los Angeles that we ever talked about woodworking. And as referenced in talking about our growth, our journey as a business only started 6 years ago. Now with an LLC, a permanent shop space we’ve recently transitioned into and an expanding list of loyal clients and designers, it’s safe to say our friendship and partnership will only continue to deepen and grow.
Can you talk to us about manufacturing? How’d you figure it all out? We’d love to hear the story.
When we started out, we didn’t know about any of the local lumber suppliers. We mostly bought all our supplies from Home Depot and Lowe’s. Don’t get us wrong, there’s nothing wrong with the big department stores, but we quickly learned there were much better options for our growing needs. We found Ganahl Lumber, who’s been supplying Southern California since 1884. They have great products, great service and a large selection of hardwoods. We stumbled across Carlos at House of Lumber in Jefferson Park. We absolutely love those guys and they can deliver our large orders directly to our shop. There’s also House of Hardwood in Westdale, Rockler, and Hudson and West in Torrence/South Bay, who, has one the most interesting Owners, Duane. We love talking with Duane every time we’re down there, haha. He has some of the best exotic hardwood selections in the city and can find you just about any dimension of lumber you need. Oh, also, if you ever find yourself Torrence, do yourself a favor and go get some food from King Mediterrano! It’s a Mediterranean and Mexican Fusion Grill and we are still trying to convince them to make t-shirts so we can do our part and provide free advertising for them.
Contact Info:
- Website: in development
- Instagram: breed_street_customs
- Facebook: Breed St. Customs
Image Credits
All images were taken by and are property of Breed Street Customs LLC