1 Trucker + 1 Dropout = America's Best Wedding Bands
In 2003, after spending about a year living in Germany I returned to my hometown of Tulsa and was culture shocked, depressed, and sick of college.
I'd been home for about 2 weeks when I met Greg, who'd been a truck driver for the past 12 years, and something just clicked between us. After a few months I dropped out of college, Greg stopped driving trucks, and we maxed out a $5000 credit card to buy an inventory of designer men's underwear and clothing.
We proceeded to open the most unusual little retail store Tulsa had ever seen, seriously it freaked people right out!
The store name was "Underguy" but when we setup the business we made our legal name "Spexton." It sounded like a cool word that didn't make any sense and I'd seen a ton of little boutiques with names like that while skipping my classes and studying beer in Europe. (Did you know they mix beer with cola?!)
Anyway as I ran the underwear shop during the day hawking my $50 per pair European tighty whities, Greg got a job making extra money in the machine shop that was behind our store.
You should know: Greg is like freaking MacGyver, he can literally make anything, use any tool, fix anything broken. I ask him "how the heck do you know how to do that?" at least once a day.
One day he came in with a piece of stainless steel scrap he'd turned into a cuff bracelet. The next day he drilled a hole in a tube and turned it into a pendant necklace. He then told me he wanted to spend all the money in our checking account to buy a mini metal lathe so that we could start making rings.
With really nothing to lose, we bought that little lathe (after he explained to me what a lathe was) and sold 100 rings in our first month. And now we had a product to go with our cool made up name: Spexton.
A year after our first ring was made, we closed the underwear shop, and opened our first full Spexton store.
Since then we've had a blast making thousands of wedding bands, creating jewelry worn by dozens of crazy-huge celebrities, having our jewelry in NY Fashion Week, being voted one of the coolest jewelry stores in the country, and who knows what's next!
At Spexton, we believe that if you only purchase one thing in your life that is custom made by the focused hands of an artist, it should be your wedding band. We are humbled every day to have the opportunity to create our special pieces for our amazing customers, and look forward to working with you too!
