We recently connected with Jay Lee and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Jay, thanks for joining us today. Owning a business isn’t always glamorous and so most business owners we’ve connected with have shared that on tough days they sometimes wonder what it would have been like to have just had a regular job instead of all the responsibility of running a business. Have you ever felt that way?

There is nothing I would rather be doing than building and running a business. I have had many careers already — and I considered nearly all of them permanent careers — something real and meaningful that I could believe in. I worked on the AIDS orphan crisis in India, I was a founder and CEO of a fintech startup, I was an executive at a local farm / food startup and I was a corporate securities lawyer on Wall Street.

Ironically, being a corporate lawyer was the crisis that led me to start my first company — and the catalyst for feeling what freedom felt like. The first time I stepped off the escalator of success — from high school to a good college to a top law school to a top law firm — and found myself sitting by myself at a desk with no team and no boss and no success, I felt electric. There was no one else to impress and no ladder to climb. Whether I succeeded or failed depended entirely on whether I could dance the dance and build *something* that people in the world actually wanted to pay money for. There was just no way of bullshitting that reality. At the same time, that meant the potential for my life was now uncapped. I could no longer see the top of the ladder that years of grinding would get me to. There was no ladder — just a wide open world of potential.

Obviously that company failed. But the feeling is still with me.

I own a small custom furniture business that occupies a very small niche. How big could it get? I don’t know. How big should it get? I don’t know. Am I still facing a wide open world of potential? Yes. Every single day.

To be honest, my business partner Caroline and I laugh at least once or twice a week about how we have been utterly ruined for normal jobs. Although we text incessantly, we only hop on actual video calls about once or twice a month. Our calendars remain entirely clear of meetings. We workout whenever we want. We run errands when we need to. We work very hard in between all of these things. Even though work remains at the center of our lives, we don’t really struggle with a work-life balance, because we maintain freedom and flexibility to live and work however suits us.

In fact, my greatest fear in this regard is what happens if the business ultimately fails. I’m in my 40s. I have not worked a normal job with normal marketable skills since 2016. What does a person in their mid-40s with no relevant job experience do if the bottom falls out?

Jay, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

My name is Jay Lee and I live in the Hudson Valley in New York with my wife, 3 kids, my dog, 4 goats, 16 chickens, 1 duck and 1 guinea fowl. I run and own Soil & Oak, a custom furniture company, with my business partner Caroline Coolidge, who is based in Chicago. Our most popular product line are brass and glass bistro / bar shelves, though we also do bookshelves and architectural built-in desks. The basic product is an amalgam of very humble materials – starting with black steel gas pipe that is transformed by brass and glass into shelving reminiscent of French Bistros and brasseries.

In short, if you have a blank wall or an empty bar and you are looking for a show-stopping shelf or storage solution, that’s where we come in. Our shelves are a bit unique because they are almost entirely defined by negative space. We could be filling a massive 24 foot by 10 foot wall – and when we’re done, our rails and wood may only occupy a few vertical and horizontal slivers of space, leaving so much potential for how the customer can bring them to life. When they’re done – they seem both airy and architectural because they are so large, but also quite minimal.

Looking back, there is no obvious path to either of our careers that led to this point. One day in 2013, we built a standing desk out of industrial pipes because we needed one. I liked the desk so I put it on Etsy. Someone bought it and I wrapped a Unabomber looking package and shipped it to to California, where they promptly re-sold it on Ebay because it was too wobbly. The second desk was better. The tenth desk was much better, and the twentieth desk was a shelf instead of a desk. I worked full-time as the VP Community and Growth at a startup and went home to my apartment to watch Game of Thrones while scraping stickers off of pipes I bought at Home Depot. For years and years, I made a little bit of extra spending money selling pipe furniture online. Over the course of 11 years and and endless succession of tiny evolutions and pivots, we currently custom design and manufacture our own components to build beautiful French Bistro shelves. I couldn’t tell you what comes next, but I can tell you that this is so much more than we could ever had expected.

The most notable thing about us is that we are not trained as designers in any way, shape or form. I was trained as a lawyer and then founded a tech company. Caroline has a masters in food systems and worked in food tech for years. So every time a beautiful “After” photo is sent to us, there’s a little bit of “can you believe we helped do this?” followed by “How did we get here, and how do we keep doing this?”

There’s no blinding insight to share about our process. Our guiding principle – from design to ongoing communication to resolving problems – is that we are just two normal people doing our best to provide a good experience with as much kindness as we can. Like anyone, we often find our personal interactions with big companies to be really dehumanizing and frustrating, almost shockingly so, and we try hard to be the opposite of that and make things smooth, easy and personal. If you have a space and you’re thinking “hey, what could I do with this wall?” you could write us a message and we’ll just tell you exactly what we think — no CAD, no complex elevations — just a simple line drawing that we lovingly think of as “Microsoft Paint…Plus?”

Do you have any stories of times when you almost missed payroll or any other near death experiences for your business?

Between 2013 and 2016, Soil & Oak was a side hustle. I had a full time salaried job and this was purely a hobby where I got to make a little bit of extra spending money by selling pipe and wood shelves and desks. In June 2016 my employer, Farmigo (a VC backed startup) shut down and I was unemployed. I started taking side consulting gigs in tech and wondering if I could make enough money from the side hustle to stay afloat.

Between 2016 and 2019, things were tight. During those years we had two children, a new house in the Hudson Valley and there just wasn’t much money coming in, but the consulting gig was paying just enough to keep us afloat on a raft of credit cards. But it wasn’t really working for me. I had an idea for a new business I wanted to launch, so in December 2019, I decided it was time to quit consulting and focus on Soil & Oak full time, until I could launch my next business.

Then the business cratered. In February 2020, my sales were virtually zero. I would open my inbox and check my spam filters and there was just nothing there. When I would normally get a trickle of inquiries every day, I would go a full week without a single message. I would go back in my message history and try to beat the bushes for leads that had dropped off. I would be *extra* meticulous and helpful with everyone who wrote in. Nothing. I floated into March on unsustainable credit card balances. And we all know what happened in March 2020.

But unexpectedly, COVID saved us. Suddenly, one product from our catalog of bookshelves and desks started to take off. The previously luxurious, architectural built-in desk designed by our good friend Becky Shea was suddenly selling at a rapid clip because people needed a home office that felt and looked great. And then a twist on our bar shelves, initially just gold spray paint on black pipes, mixed with glass shelves became a huge seller. And that was it. Years and years of wooden bookshelves and black pipe morphed with the small twist of gold paint and glass into a beautiful bar shelf.

Fast forward to today, the bar shelf (no longer made with gold spray paint) makes up 95% of our entire business.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

When we first transitioned from industrial black pipe furniture into delicate gold and glass shelving, we used one very particular brand of spray paint — Design Master Gold Medal. After trying dozens and dozens of finishes, this was the only paint that worked. It was available on Amazon and at Michael’s stores.

Sometime in the summer of 2020, Design Master went through some sort of unknown production issue. At that time, it sounded like the factory shut down entirely, with no plans to re-open, But the sales kept coming in and we were running out of paint. We emptied all the online retailers. We emptied all the Michael’s stores in our respective cities. We were in trouble.

Our solution? We scheduled our first company offsite in Cuyahoga Falls Ohio. Caroline got in her car in Chicago and I got in my car in New York and for a full day, we drove very meticulously planned routes. Those routes took us to as many Michael’s as humanly possible in the span of a single day. All day and night, we’d rush into those stores, empty the shelves of Design Master Gold Medal — we’d rummage through the black bins tucked beneath the shelf displays and empty those too. We’d run out of those stores with armfuls of spray paint like maniacs, filling our cars with as many spray cans as possible. I dreamed of a day when I could Scrooge McDuck swim my way through a vault full of spray paint cans. What a rush when we hit a store with 5 full cans! And of course, after our offsite in the deluxe resorts near …. Akron Ohio?…we took another route home to hit the remaining Michaels.

Fortunately, that summer we finally found a manufacturing partner who could manufacture true brass-plated rails to replace our spray painted bistro shelves just before the last can was used up.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://soilandoak.com
• Instagram: @soilandoak
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hsienjaylee. https://www.linkedin.com/in/caroline-coolidge-032a4aa/

Image Credits

Becky Shea Design
Rachel Martino
Tilly Blair Photography