Editor’s note: This story is part of Good Times’ annual Home & Garden 2019 magazine. Read the full issue here.
Moss and lichen on a picture frame are the kind of details I never knew I wanted. This was probably also true for local husband-and-wife makers Chris and Paige Curtis, who started Alibi Interiors seven years ago. A former paramedic, Chris had some photographs he wanted to frame. Instead of going shopping he looked to the old pile of wood in the backyard.
After Chris taught himself how to make frames and told a friend at Stripe that he had started dabbling, they ordered $1,000 worth of frames on the spot.
“I hardly even knew what I was doing. I was just messing around in the yard,” Chris recalls. “I think they sent like half of them back. But for me, that changed everything. When someone believes in you, it helps create so much.”
Now the pair makes thousands of pieces each month in the busy season, always keeping in mind that the materials they use to build the products are just as important as the products themselves. They’ve had orders ship to Japan and Canada and were recently featured on the Today show for Small Business Saturday.
“We were in San Francisco when the feature came out,” Paige says. “We weren’t able to watch it, but we watched the orders come through at like three a minute.”
The couple started their business a few years after they began dating, and their relationship has grown along with the business. They started off with picture frames but now make mirrors, garden boxes, tables and more. It’s all a bit surreal. At one point they were making frames for fun, and now they’re meeting Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter and CEO of the mobile payment company Square, on television.
“A lot of our online sales were local to California and the West Coast, but after the Today show we started shipping to the East Coast and Midwest,” Chris says. “It was so much more than we had ever done before. It’s been slow steady growth for a couple of years now, and then this year I realized that it all compounded on itself.”
Despite more than 100 wholesale clients, the couple still has a personal relationship with about 80 percent of customers. Paige recently launched Hunter by Alibi Interiors, a collection of curated second-hand goods, and Chris has been working on a lot of larger custom pieces, like tables and bookshelves, which he says can be a nice break from making frames.
“These pieces were made from an old 1910 wine tank. It’s actually smells like cabernet. It’s amazing,” he says gesturing to a table. “I’ve done a few pieces with the wine tank. The tannins and acids in the wine have left these dark streaks. It’s really fun.”
“Our material is sourced equally from fence boards, old barns and local demolitions, but it’s always really exciting when we get some unique wood that was part of a 1800s barn or a bait tank,” Paige adds.
The couple says they are always looking for unique pieces, but they rely mostly on a network of people to find reclaimed wood. They can’t always take all of the wood they find; sometimes it’s too coated in paint or filled with termites.
But the sustainable aspect of Alibi doesn’t end at their repurposed wood. When it comes to packing and shipping materials, the founders take to social media to ask the community to drop off paper, boxes or used packing peanuts in exchange for a frame.
“People want to be a part of something sustainable,” Paige says. “It feels good to recycle and buy products that are second-hand or repurposed. It’s time-consuming, but it’s so worth it.”
