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We went down to a flea market down on 25th street in Manhattan and would see little bits of industrial popping up; a lamp, a table, a stool, a chair, whatever. And it really caught our interest, so much so that, you know we felt an immediate attachment to it for some reason.
But we didn’t just only want to buy it and sell it; We saw great potential in it. Especially in the cast iron pieces, machine bases, pieces that were used in heavy industry we could see a great potential in the castings, because we love the castings. We think the process that they go through to make these castings is great. And you know, they were made at a time when labor was cheap but material was expensive so they could afford to put a lot into the design and the making of these pieces, which you don’t really find now. It is just too expensive to do it.
That really attracted us to something that was actually being thrown into scrapyards and it was just a whole piece of America that was just being discarded. So that’s why we called our company Get Back.
You know when people saw it initially and saw what we were doing, they had a similar reaction that we had, “What is this? This is fabulous. Where’d you get this?” You know, it wasn’t – it wasn’t the usual antique that you would see you know because it wasn’t classed as anything, it wasn’t openly available on the antique market as antiques. It’s not antiques, we class it as vintage and we like to use that term because anything we buy we really like it to be at least 50 years old, preferably pre-second world war. So it’s not technically an antique, but it’s the look that is just so like different.
Our whole idea in the beginning was we wanted it to be used. We wanted people to use this. So we always kept that in mind. We didn’t want to present it just as art, you know because we certainly could fill building after building. So if we found tables we wanted to present them as tables. We wanted to keep them as pure as possible to their original use.
We do a tremendous amount of work with designers and architects and so forth and we think this look is a piece of American Industrial history that absolutely everybody should have one of these pieces in their home. Not only for its beauty and its functionality. Just to be able to say, “I have a piece of original American Industrial history in my home that we still use today” and we think that’s brilliant. We think that’s something that you pass on and pass on and pass on.
