Eighty Seven: By Design (I)

Note: What follows is part one of a two-part interview with Sam and Jake Martin, twins and co-owners of Eighty Seven (‘87), a candle and furniture company in Austin, Tx. We figure it will be simpler to digest in two smaller bites, and will release the rest of the interview next week. We also figure Eighty Seven is a group worth checking out, and hope that after reading this that so will you. Now please, enjoy the interview.

Sam and Jake Martin aren’t always in sync. The twin brothers own Eighty Seven (‘87), an Austin-based small batch candle and custom furniture company, but they’ve run every business from trash haul to concert shuttles. There’s a natural and pervasive hustle to everything these two do, and their family bond keeps them glued to the grind as they build in their own unique directions.

Texas transplants, their roots in the Pacific Northwest and early days of entrepreneurship in the Denver underground music scene shape their minimal design and tireless drive; less than a year old, Eighty Seven already finds itself an in demand boutique of hotels, shops, and private clients. We plied the pair with food, wine, and music, then asked them to spill what makes their style, and team, work so naturally.

Chandler Jake Martin carefully crafts each batch.

CC: Let’s start at the beginning. Y’all were born in 1987, and you came into this world together..

Jake: Yea, so Sam came out one after the other! He was a little larger and more lively than I was, (laughs) but they revived me. ‘87 was a helluva year.

Sam: And the year of my favorite sports car: 1987 BMW 525. Late 80s auto design is going to be the future eventually. It’s gonna come back around.

CC: Y’all are from Colorado right?

Sam: No, we were born in Madison and then at one month we were whisked to Olympia, Washington and we lived there til we were 13. I feel like a lot of the aesthetic of living in the Pacific Northwest has guided me in my adult life; or at least showed me what I want to get back to eventually.

Some of my most important moments were spent walking around the woods in the Pacific Northwest. Something about that smell; the dank earth and foliage. Something about being in trees specifically. I don’t care for mountains even though in Colorado it’s all we were exposed to. It never felt like home.

Sam Martin uses his eye for nature to bring simple beauty to Eighty Seven’s furniture.

CC: Colorado?

Jake: Yea, at the beginning of 8th grade. (both laugh painfully) Acne, puka shell necklaces and no friends. Think about moving from a culturally rich port town to a suburb outside of Denver. (shudders)

Sam: What was cool was being able to leave that. We moved to Boulder and that’s when we really started to experiment with live shows. One of our best friends at the time started a bus company that took old concert busses and turned them into shuttles. We dove in. We were 30 minutes from Denver and 30 minutes from red rock, and as kids we were able to create this community that was all about going to new spaces and checking out new creative spaces. We went all the way from DIY warehouse shows to main stage Red Rocks shows and everything in between, and we were bringing 40-50 people with us all the time.

We had our own little thing going. In doing so we spent a lot of time at a DIY place called Rhinoceropolis. Denver had this incredibly ripe warehouse scene at the time. We were those little 21 year old assholes. I think in taking a lot of those trips to Rhinoceropolis, we were able to latch on to that entrepreneurial feeling. At the same time I started making more trunk music and playing live shows, Jake started a music blog called Speaker Snacks.

Jake: Speaker Snacks was a DIY, independent music blog..

CC: A blog focused on independent/DIY music, or a DIY/independent blog?

Jake: Both. This was in 2007-8. I was sharing music while DJing so I decided to create this hub so I wouldn’t have to share music personally all the time. That time was THE music blog era. That was the start of it, and so I met a whole community of people all over the world. Through doing that I started an even bigger music blog called Portals with Tyler Andere. We founded it together. I don’t do it anymore but it’s still around.

Eighty Seven’s grapefruit moss candles transforming the smell and feel of a room.

CC: Tell me about this brotherly entrepreneurial dynamic.

Jake: We couldn’t survive any other way. I think it spawns from having uber-conservative parents who worked boring government 9-to-5’s. I don’t know why that hit us as not the right path from such an early age.

Sam: I don’t think we’ve ever tried to make this our reality, it’s just something that we’ve always done. It can be a detriment when we’re on our own hustles, I have to make sure Jake and I are in sync.

Jake: ‘87 wouldn’t exist, us making candles wouldn’t exist, if my mom didn’t open a little home goods shop in Conifer, Colorado. She sold home goods there and candles were her hottest seller. I opened that shop and worked with her all the time. It was great to see her fulfilling a dream after working her other job for so long.

CC: So y’all made a decision to fail attempting happiness and independence rather than concede to anything you’d consider a mundane lifestyle.

Sam: 1000%.

Jake: And that spawned 87. We were originally selling other people’s candles.

Sam (left) and Jake (right) Martin.

Sam: I’ll tell you exactly where the shift happened. Jake started Yellow Barn Candle Company after my mom closed her shop. He eventually took over the lease, same building, and when his first business partner moved to New York, I took over that half of the company. I was already looking for a way out of my job at the moment, so I just took it. We started crunching numbers when we needed to re-order some stuff and were like, “Hey, why don’t we make our own shit?”

Jake: We could do it just as good or better than other people and increase our margin 1000%.

(all laugh)

Sam: No, but I think what happened is that we started making our own candles and realized that, a, we liked doing it because it’s a hands-on, creative process, and b, we could do it pretty well. I think something that we try to take with us at all times is that it’s not just a candle, it’s also a showpiece. Anything that you put out in your house is something that you want people to look at. You want people to see it and you also want it to communicate with your daily life. It’s both.

We realized when living in Colorado that we are so encapsulated by the look and feel of home life. There’s something truly special about having a nice, clean space to work in that feels and smells like you. A home has a personality, character, a vibe built into it. After making candles and realizing we could control that, we were hooked.

An ‘87 installation.

We''ll post the second installment of this interview for y’all next week.

For now, go check out Eighty Seven’s work.