-No, -No,
not in --
we did not expect that we would be doing this.
I never expected in a million years.
No.
Hi, I'm Wes.
I used to be a house painter.
And I'm Richie, and I used to be in marketing and advertising.
And now we build erotic furniture.
We cater towards all the BDSM community,
but also the adult baby community.
I'm married to my daddy.
-You know, they want to feel... -Small.
The fantasy, yeah, they want to feel like a small or whatever.
Every day we go through orders and what we're going
to be working on that day or that week.
Because it gets confusing and we don't have
a ton of shop space right now.
And come on in. This is where the magic happens.
Yes, this is our shop.
Lust & Lore is a custom furniture company
that is targeted specifically towards the BDSM community.
Here's our list -- an adult crib, the adult high chair.
And then there's the bondage bench.
And then, of course, these two high chairs
that are in the house right now.
I build, then Wes starts his process.
Which is basically staining or painting, you know,
and then we do the packing stuff together.
So I had no experience with the fetish community
until we got here
and started having conversations with people.
And a lot of times we learn about stuff
as it's brought before us.
From my understanding,
adult babies are people who like to be treated like infants,
you know, taken care of, cleaned and fed, diapered,
showered, bathed, all that kind of stuff.
And we make specific equipment for them,
such as giant adult sized cribs, giant adult sized chairs.
And so we create furniture
that actually fulfills the fantasy and the illusion.
And, you know, I mean, just so you know too,
we're not in, like, this community or whatever.
So we're speaking from what we've been
able to learn from people.
So hold on, I'll show you.
We'll have Wes sit in it for scale.
Why do I have to sit in it?
We actually sort of built these up since they're bigger now.
I feel originally we got -- when we started on 'em,
they were sort of glorified bar stools.
So we sort of added some height to 'em.
So an adult high chair, I think runs now around
$900 plus shipping and handling,
which is one of our lower end items.
Changing table price is similar to a crib's price,
which is around two grand.
The higher end, things like the king-size bondage bed
can end up running close to five grand.
He and I had been together since September of 2001,
we got married six years ago this summer.
We were in a club in Nashville and this guy tapped me
and said, "Hey, my friend thinks you're hot."
And that's actually our meeting story.
And he said, no, I never said anything like that.
And basically, we've been together ever since.
We have.
I began my career
as a graphic artist
and then became head of marketing for a large company.
Corporate America -- it doesn't have a soul.
And I thought, I'm going to end up where I have lived,
a life where I just worked myself to death
to make somebody else a million dollars
and I'm just empty inside.
I painted houses for a living, I had my own business,
so I still do exactly the same thing.
I just get to do it with this one.
We decided to sell everything we owned in Nashville,
and our friend said, you know, I have a great place in Oregon,
you guys just come and stay with me till you figure out
where you want to land on the West Coast.
I heard that he was building custom beds.
I really didn't know the extent of how custom the beds were.
As he was coming out here
and building some of his projects,
I said, I want to come down and learn,
just -- just show me.
I helped him build, I'd say, three beds.
A couple of months later, you know.
Yeah, we -- he had the stroke.
And if we hadn't been here,
he probably wouldn't have survived.
He'd have died right out there in the bushes where he fell.
And so we picked up the business
just to keep it moving for him until he could get better.
And then once it became apparent
that he wasn't ever going to be able to pick this back up,
that's when we reached out to our other business partner,
who is related to him,
and we all started talking about how we could keep this going.
I'm sort of our de facto CEO and co-founder.
My father founded this business
and was essentially running it
as a one-man operation
for the better part of five or six years
before getting ill.
And my dad was good friends with both of them,
so it's amazing that two people like this
that I've known essentially my entire life,
the trust that we have, it's really everything.
This is not like a fast process.
Every piece is built to order for every person.
So we make hardware store trips
typically a dozen times a week or more.
I was looking at like the cedar post.
Ooh! I think they've come down in price a little bit.
They have come down in price a little bit.
You know, if you buy all the materials for a bed,
that by itself can top $500,
and that's before you even put in, you know,
40 hours' worth of labor; on top of that,
at the end, you have incredibly high shipping prices right now
because freight rates are incredibly expensive.
We packed up some stocks which we are getting ready
to ship out to a customer.
I think a crib's shipment price
typically runs about $250 for us.
And it's going on the West Coast
it might be 350; if it goes to the East Coast
we've seen them be as much as $700 and $800,
which is all money we've got to eat,
because you can't put that kind of shipping price.
It can be pretty brutal.
Any time somebody messages me.
I like to be sure that they have a response
within 60 minutes at the latest.
In the ordering process, they ask a lot of questions.
People want these things to be tailored
towards them personally.
I had one guy reach out to us.
He goes, "I need an adult crib,
but I want it to be a pen."
There's a puppy fetish too, puppy play, it's called.
He wanted it to feel like "PAW Patrol."
You know, there's a kids program and he wanted it in that blue
and he wanted a special logo done.
And you can't really see it up close,
but these are all like little paw prints
that have been painted into it.
Richie cut all this out, custom painted it by hand.
It was probably about this big,
I believe it cost me $1,400.
It was well worth the price that he was asking for it.
I generally play the age of, like, eight to six years old.
I have a lot of, like, toddler stuff
and I wear diapers and stuff like that.
And I'm married to my daddy.
We've been married for four years.
And then later on I discovered pup play,
and I often mix ABDL with pup play.
As for cribs,
there's only like five or six sites
that I've ever found,
and most of them are charging $6,000 and $7,000.
And the reason why that is 'cause a lot of them are
European based.
And so you have to pay, like $500, $600 in shipping
just to have it crated up and shipped to you.
Like, I was on Etsy, which is the site that Wes is on,
and I found him just out of, like, sheer luck.
His quality is top notch.
I think that some people may feel like they have
to be secretive and sort of underground
about their -- about their fetishes,
about things that they're into, not that they feel like
they have to be that way with us, you know,
because I think that they look at us
as sort of part of the community
because we cater to the communities.
And that's sort of a company goal for us too,
is to, uh --
Destigmatize it.
Destigmatize this, and tell people, you know,
it's okay for two consenting adults to decide
that they want to do whatever this is together.
Pup play and ABDL sites,
those are very, very sheltered fetishes
because not a lot of people understand those right now.
Certain professions, like, you know, frown upon it.
Like, if you're working with children every day and you say,
"Oh, I'm an ABDL,"
well, you're probably not going to have a job anymore.
I'm from Mississippi.
And when I first came out as gay,
a lot of my family didn't speak to me for 10 years.
And there's this judgment, then, you know?
And I know the world is very different now,
but that's how I feel about our customers,
is I don't want them to feel judgment.
I want them to be excited and accepted and understand
that, like, hey, this is something you're excited about
and that you're going to love.
And we just want to build that, you know, for them.
We want them to have
that anticipation and joy along the way.
So what I'm looking at here is my Etsy dashboard,
which is where I keep up with all of our analytics.
Right now, this year,
we've gotten off to a really hot start.
I mean, a 2,000% jump year over year is massive.
So there's a community out there, it's underserved
and there's money to be made there.
I think last year, even with the pandemic,
it was somewhere around -- somewhere around $90,000.
And this year we're already about 1,400%
above where we were last year at this time.
So we could conceivably go $150,000, $200,000 or more.
What we're essentially going to be doing
is relaunching this summer,
we'll be relaunching around a summer collection.
So obviously as we scale, that's the most important part,
is making sure that quality is maintained.
This is the very unexpected side hustle
that I didn't really plan on ever being a meaningful part of.
In the early stages, I truly wanted nothing to do with it.
I was still really coming to grips with my dad's identity.
I just wasn't sort of in a mature enough place
to take it seriously.
And it's taken a lot of -- a lot of growth on my side.
Obviously, as you can see, by wanting to stay anonymous,
I still have some more -- some more growing to do
before I can really be the face of this,
but I'm really proud of what we've built so far.
And it's really opened my eyes to the fact
that, again, this is a space that deserves to be normalized.
I'd say if it's not a seven-figure business
in the next couple of years, I'll have not done my job.
But beyond just the creation of a brand,
my goal with all of this was just to effect
a better life for the folks involved in the business,
and that's my dad and Wes and Richie.
I truly see them like family,
and if we have no other financial successes
other than those three are taken care of,
then I'm cool with that.
♪♪
There's nights that we finish down here
and we close everything up
and there's something about coming down
either later that evening or the next morning
and seeing the fully finished product that you've done,
the fruits of your labor sitting there in front of you,
fully manifested, and you're like,
"Fuck, I made that!"
You know, "I built that from start to finish.
I created this, now I'm gonna send it off
to somebody else to love."
And when you look at that and you go,
you know, a year, two years ago,
we couldn't have done what we are able to do now.
And that is -- that is a fundamental change
in the person that I am.
It's that hindsight thing where I keep looking back at my life,
and every part of my life has always prepared me
for every other part of my life.
This is just one more of those things.
I can't wait to see what I'm being prepared for next.
♪♪