Our Story
About 10 minutes into our ride, we came upon an intersection that we had the right of way but a large SUV decided otherwise. We were cut off by the SUV and slammed directly into it, it wasn’t a pretty scenario. My wife spent days in the ICU because of her injuries and I made sure to visit everyday even though I was pretty banged up myself. Because of the accident our bond grew and that year I proposed to my wife on a cruise that we went on to celebrate the fact that we survived a catastrophic motorcycle crash. On July 31st, of 2015, the one-year anniversary of our crash, we married and bought our first home together.
Years later our first child was born in May of 2018, our son Damien. Everything was coming into play; my wife was doing design work for a big box hardware store and I was in the food and beverage industry managing a bar at a local hotspot restaurant. We then got pregnant with our daughter Avery, everything was going according to plan until the world turned upside down and COVID took over.
Being in the food and beverage industry, my job was put on hold because of lockdowns and restriction and with my wife still pregnant she was furloughed and on leave until after our daughter’s birth. We were one of those lucky couples to be caught in the void and fog of everything and had no assistance in any form of income and things needless to say were getting extremely worrisome and financially tight. What were we to do?
With my daughter being born in June of 2020 and the world slowly opening back up, the restaurant that I had been working at re-opened but of course with restrictions and wasn’t the same financially, we had to find something else to do especially with all the uncertainty still in the world concerning COVID.
We sold off some personal belongings and, on a whim, decided to buy a laser engraving machine, a Glowforge. Who knew this would be the beginning of a whole new world for us? With my wife’s background in design and interior design and with the help of my social media connections we started to grow and develop our own brand and eventually formed The Collective Textile LLC.
We are a small yet growing business, we work out of our garage and now have a brand new, bigger and better laser to help create our products and customized and personalized items. It’s been a wild ride to say the least and we know that we are still just in the dawn of this adventure and can’t wait to see what is in store for our family and growing business in the future.