Randy Rosetta| Lubbock Avalanche-Journal
Lubbock has long been identified as a proud and independent city built on the framework of gritty personalities and individuality.
Hub City residents swell with pride at the idea of being one-of-a-kind people who demand one-of-a-kind goods and services. Loyalty is tightly woven as a connection between those people and where they get those goods and services, and those notions serve as a common thread among the businesses featured this month.
Artists like Dawna Gillespie and Lee Ware have dedicated their lives to creating unique pieces of work that won’t be found anywhere else in the world and have a strong kinship to the customer.
In a region punctuated by a farming and ranching heritage, Jared Coffelt, from Flint Custom Hats, and Brad Glenn, of BG Leather Shop and Custom Boots, proudly supply the men and women who work the land with important pieces of gear they need to be safe and productive – as well as for when they need to relax and show out.
When those times to relax pop up, Lucas Pinkerton is ready to provide the spirits he creates at Pinkerton’s Distillery to get the party started.
All created by folks who have come to embrace the community that has welcomed them and helped them grow.
When he made the move from Canyon, Texas, to Lubbock in 2005, about the most Jared Coffelt knew about cowboy hats was how to wear them.
With a family background in ranching and time spent on the rodeo circuit, Coffelt said there were always cowboy hats around.
A chance to secure a “pretty good college job” began a process that changed Coffelt’s life arc dramatically, and cowboy hats were at the heart of that metamorphosis.
That simple twist of fate put Coffelt at the doorstep of Flint Custom Hats as a part-time apprentice of sorts while he worked his way through Texas Tech University.
“I got a part-time job in college, and every day I was there, the guys I worked for taught me stuff in the hat shop,” Coffelt says. “I developed an interest in hatmaking and had the right mindset because I wanted to learn.
“There came a point when the guy managing the shop began a new career, and the hat shop became my responsibility. The guy who owned the place, David Conklin, started grooming me to take over and that started the ball rolling for me. This chance really just sort of fell in my lap, and I’m pretty glad it did.”
In 2011, Coffelt and his wife, Kesli, bought the store. Now, with 14 years of experience under his belt, Coffelt has carved a niche as one of the top hatmakers in Texas, and is a perfect example of a craftsman and entrepreneur.
Flint Custom Hats was already on solid footing after opening in 1997, so it’s not like Coffelt had to re-invent the wheel. The company has thrived under his guidance, largely because of how his expertise has evolved.
The foundation of what Flint Custom Hats and Coffelt aim to provide is custom-made cowboy hats in a variety of materials, colors and styles. He estimates there are eight to 12 hatmakers in Texas and takes pride in “not just punching out a cookie-cutter product.”
“My favorite part about what I do is that every single hat is different,” Coffelt explains. “We are not a production facility. We’re a custom shop. Everyone is going to be fit with the perfect hat because everybody’s head is a little different.
“Quality of the work is important to me. We want to put out a product that holds up. I’m proud of seeing guys wear our hats because for most guys, these are one of their tools – something they’ve got to have all the time. Their hats have got to stand up to weather and abuse. We’ve built relationships with guys because they know I am going to stand behind what I make for them.”
And after nearly 8 years running the show, Coffelt has created plenty to stand behind. He says Flint produces between 350 to 500 new hats a year, each one requiring 5 to 8 hours of intensive manufacturing time.
As is the case in most Texas cities, there are a handful of Western stores in Lubbock, but few specialize as much as Flint Custom Hats.
Coffelt says the Hub City is a perfect market for his craft.
“Lubbock is a really good location for me and this kind of business,” Coffelt says. “It’s still very much an agricultural-based area, so we’ve got a pretty good spread of ranch land in this part of the world and that gives me a lot of opportunity to take care of a lot of people. When people are shopping for something big, they come to Lubbock because it’s a central location, and that’s helped us build a really big customer base.”
Loyal as well.
A domino effect of the quality of Coffelt’s craftsmanship is how many customers return.
“I have three filing cabinets full of head-shaped patterns because so many people come back and see us,” says Coffelt. “We have one guy and his family who we build new hats for every year, and that’s one of my favorite parts of this because you know you’re doing something right. I think something that’s important to our customers is that I’m not a salesman – I’m a hatmaker. They know I want to give them exactly what they want and for it to be something that will hold up and last.”
Makes perfect sense. Because with Coffelt’s skills as a hatmaker in a demanding market, Flint Custom Hats is built to last.
BG Leather Shop and Custom Boots
Brad Glenn makes custom cowboy boots, and does so very well.
To define the Plainview native as simply a successful craftsman and business owner would be way off target, though.
Glenn owns Lubbock-based BG Leather Shop and Custom Boots, which is located on the east end of Cactus Alley. The shop specializes in custom cowboy boots, as well as purses, wallets, Bible covers, belts and other products made of leather.
BG Leather Shop and Custom Boots celebrates its third anniversary this month, and Glenn says business is as good as it has ever been.
“We have thrived beyond measure,” says Glenn.
His pride is attached to more than just the bottom line, though.
Before he headed south to Lubbock to embark on a journey as a business owner, Glenn’s path was chock-full of hurdles. A battle with drugs and alcohol was a deterrent that remained constant until Glenn bottomed out and wound up at a rehab facility in Midland – Teen Challenge Adult Centers of Texas, Inc.
The center’s mission statement is self-described as a “faith-based organization that assists people with life-controlling problems, such as alcohol or drug abuse.”
Glenn grew up attending First Baptist Church in Plainview, so the foundation of faith was in place. But his battles with drugs and alcohol had him teetering on a precarious emotional precipice, and Glenn doesn’t shy away from the fact that he contemplated suicide several times.
His stay at Teen Challenge served a dual purpose of helping him work though his addictions and reigniting his faith.
BG Leather Shop and Custom Boots was an important step in both processes, as well.
“What we do is as much about ministry as it is about being a boot shop, because getting saved from drugs and alcohol is such an important part of my life,” Glenn says. “When I left Amarillo, all I had with me was my dog, a few sets of clothes and my pickup. After I got done at Teen Challenge, I realized I had gotten a second chance from God and wanted to make the best of it.”
With that chance, he intends to make sure his faith is prominent in his business career.
His parents, Mike and Vickie Glenn, own Cactus Alley, had a spot open, and offered to allow him to open a shop there.
An interest in leatherwork and an awareness of the high demand for boots in West Texas gave Glenn the inspiration he needed, and he decided to add his own touch.
At the back of every boot Glenn produces – which is seven or eight a month – he carves a cross in the leather and inscribes the book and verse of a bible scripture.
No explanation given and plenty of curiosity piqued. To help witness, Glenn wants to give his customers a reason to dive into the Bible to find the verse and also what it means.
“I consider my ability to work with my hands as a true gift from God – a given talent,” Glenn says. “My dad did leather work when I was growing up, and I showed some interest when I was young. But it really became my career when I needed something to get my life headed in the right direction.
“I’ve had a lot of people come buy boots just because they have a cross and scripture. They know I put my blood and guts and heart into it. My vision is to make the best custom-fit cowboy boot around and to lead more people from where they’re at to where God wants them to be.”
Being in West Texas puts Glenn in an ideal location to blend his two passions.
“Because it’s West Texas, cowboy boots are never going to die off,” he says. “No matter what goes on, cowboy boots will always be a thing, and it’s not only cowboys and ranchers. I’ve built a lot of dress boots for doctors, lawyers, bankers and businessmen.”
Being different is sort of the baseline for all artists. Dawna Gillespie wasn’t ready to settle for the status quo.
So after a long and winding road through college – with an important pitstop in a class that redirected her artistic soul – Gillespie established the foundation she follows now.
Gillespie’s Lubbock-based company, Copper d Studio, offers patrons a unique selection of jewelry crafted primarily from raw copper and brass.
What separates Gillespie’s work from others is the level of its uniqueness. Not only are her pieces custom made, there is a conscious effort to take that distinctiveness to another level.
On her website, Gillespie describes her mission as an “unwavering purpose” to connect never-produced jewelry with beautiful souls, one at a time.
“The purpose of my work is to defy our society’s need for mass-produced accessories,” she says. “I don’t make anything that’s on trend, and I never reproduce what I make. I make sure everything is one of a kind.”
Put in nutshell form, Gillespie’s motto is “Creating from the soul, for the soul.”
To arrive where she is today, Gillespie went through a bit of unexpected soul-searching while she was on her way to a degree at Texas Tech University.
For as long as Gillespie could remember – as far back as the time she splashed her entire bedroom (walls, furniture and bed spread) with paint as a toddler – wielding a paint brush was the art form she figured would be her calling.
Needing a class outside of her specialty to balance 60 hours of painting, she enrolled in a metalworking course that she thought might be interesting.
“As soon as I got the jeweler’s saw in my hands, it hooked me,” she says. “It was very meditative to me. I was more at ease and felt more like myself than when I was painting.
“There is some sort of internal connection you need to be steady. You have to be clear and concise with a plan of where you’re going with each piece. When I got comfortable with metalworking, it just took over and it became more of my plan than a paint brush in my hand.”
Similar to the jewelry work she produces now, her affinity for metalwork art clicked because Gillespie could be individualistic instead of relying on something that had been done over and over before.
She found a perfect audience in Lubbock and West Texas, and after returning to the area her career began to take shape.
From the time she arrived in the Hub City as a 17-year-old, Gillespie felt a connection to West Texas. She and husband Robert relocated to Dodge City, Kansas, for him to pursue a job in his field, and she took classes at the community college there.
To complete her degree, the family moved back to Lubbock and she re-connected to a community that fed her motivation as she worked toward a degree.
“Lubbock fits me because people here are all about just being authentic, standing your ground and having a voice of your own and not following somebody else’s footsteps,” says Gillespie. “I try as hard as possible to be genuine and real, open and honest, and I think that makes me more relatable to people here.
“Lubbock is growing toward the idea of getting back to craftsmanship. People are turning away from mass-produced stuff and toward stuff being made by hand.”
And people are recognizing the special work that Gillespie generates.
Heidi and Larry Simmons of Lubbock’s Tornado Gallery have emerged as benefactors to Gillespie as she has earned a place as one of the more visible artists on the South Plains.
This month, her work will be featured prominently in the Lubbock Arts Alliance Artist Studio Tour, which enables potential patrons to view every item on sale, as well meet artists one-on-one.
“It’s overwhelming to realize that people are appreciative of what I was doing, especially when we live in a world where so much is about trends,” Gillespie says. “When you are appreciated and are recognized for stepping out of the box, it reinforces the idea that I am doing the right thing, that people appreciate craftsmanship and individuality.”
Gillespie has also been featured in several national art magazines and has been invited to a number of exhibitions. Early next year, her work will be the designer collection in Belle Armoire Jewelry, an international magazine dedicated to artesian jewelry.
For a stay-at-home mom of a 4-year-old, a passion has also become a way to make a living.
“The realization has hit me this year finally that I can do this for a living and that has given me a lot of confidence,” Gillespie says.
At first, Quinton Hight was just a guy growing a beard. After all, he had seen plenty of other men go for a different look and the new trend appealed to him.
So when Hight made a career change to spend more time with his wife and three daughters, he reframed his appearance.
“I had always liked the stubbled appearance, and when I decided to leave middle school coaching and kind of start over, I thought ‘I’m going to grow my beard out and see what it looks like,’” the 40-year-old Hight says. “I started it and never really stopped and let it grow for a year. It really kind of changed me and the way I interacted with people.”
The beard also created an impactful domino effect that has allowed Hight to tie three important elements of his life together.
Hight is the founder, owner, developer and jack-of-all trades for the Horned Toad Beard Co., which produces and distributes distinctively scented beard oil and beard balm to a growing market.
It was that market that caught Hight’s attention after he had sprouted a healthy batch of facial hair. He needed something to treat his new scruff and found a small and less-than-inspiring marketplace for materials to care for his beard.
After some research, Hight decided he could make his own beard-care products, and perhaps come up with something better than what he had discovered.
Not long after Hight’s appearance began to transform, his mother, Sheryl, was phased out of her job and found a less-than-welcoming employment market. So her son proposed a deal: He would launch a company and she would be his first employee – a mom-and-son shop instead of mom-and-pop.
“Family has always been a driving force for me because I grew up in a house with a single mom who worked hard to take care of us,” says Hight, a Coronado High School and Lubbock Christian University graduate whose full-time job is teaching fourth-grade science and social studies.
“She lost her job and was really close to retirement age, so she was kind of on the fence and didn’t know what to do. I wanted to do anything I could do to help her, and I saw a chance in an industry that was just starting to take off.”
With a two-birds-with-one-stone approach, Hight hatched the Horned Toad Beard Co. with a new angle and personal touch mixed in to serve the growing demand for beard-care products.
Beards have been around as long as man, Hight points out, but the desire to groom facial hair is a fairly new phenomenon.
Keeping a face full of whiskers trimmed, clean and neat was important to Hight – and presumably to his wife and three daughters – so the former middle school football and wrestling coach with a degree in psychology and strong interest in science went to work creating a different kind of beard-care product.
“Until I grew my beard out, I had never thought about needing to take care of it,” he says. “But there are so many different ways to take care of it and maintain it.”
Add Mom to the equation and you get a designer beard-care product.
To make sure his product was unique, Hight and his mother collaborated to create a variety of eight distinct scents.
“All the scents we do have a personal feel and a personal story behind them, and my mom is very important in that,” Hight says. “When I am looking for scents and making new blends, one of the biggest elements is that it can bring back memories, and she is very in touch with that part of it.
“We took a grassroots approach and put it out there and people are buying into it.”
Especially in his hometown, which makes Hight’s story that much more gratifying.
As the Horned Toad Beard Co. began to blossom, Hight got help from fellow local business owners. Although his product has reached Amarillo, Midland-Odessa and the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, the bulk of Horned Toad Beard Co.’s distribution is in the Hub City,
“The people in Lubbock have been fantastic,” Hight says. “We definitely would not be where we are without local businesses supporting us. What I have learned about Lubbock is that people here who are local want to support local. You get to meet and discuss what we can do to help each other. You’d be hard-pressed to find that with bigger, brand-name companies. We’re like a lot of local businesses in that when you need us, you talk to the owner – not just a salesman. That personal touch makes it a real special thing.”
Lee Ware bounced around life for a while, dabbling in different professions and connecting dots that, whether he knew it or not, would all converge one day.
All along, when life got hectic and stress crept to higher levels, the Morton native held on to a unique hobby that he had embraced at a young age and fostered as he navigated adulthood.
Now that hobby – intertwined with the experiences he gained from stops all around the world – has morphed into a full-time labor of love.
Ware’s Lubbock-based company, Unity in Glass, specializes in the art of glassblowing with an emphasis on supplying a unique and memorable element to wedding ceremonies.
On the company’s website, the Unity in Glass process is described as a collaborative process that “captures your spirit.” Similar to sand ceremonies or unity candles, the bride and groom create a once-in-a-lifetime memory using glass crystals in colors of their choosing. Those crystals are blended by the wedding participants – which can be only the bride and groom or can include others – and are fashioned by Ware’s company into one of a handful of pre-selected forms (sculpture, case or bowl).
“Each piece is unique,” says Ware, who launched his company in 2010. Unity in Glass is a five-person operation (including Ware) that produces its work in a Depot District studio. “There are five basic designs, but we customize each piece. We tied what we do into weddings, and we were the first to do that in the world.
“In my artistic vision, I wanted to elicit an emotional response from the viewers of my work and that all begins with clients kicking off the creative process at their wedding. I often imagine the stories my clients tell when somebody sees their piece. What we make for them allows them to tell a special story.”
Ware’s story of how he went from working as a registered nurse in a variety of specialties to becoming a highly successful expert in glassblowing possesses several twists and turns.
After stints at Texas Tech and South Plains College, Ware headed to Seattle in 1992 and found a place to nurture his life-long interest in glass art at the renowned Pratt Fine Arts Center. From there, Ware expanded his professional horizons to jobs in corporate health care sales and marketing, a job that took him to Europe, China and all over the U.S. He wound up in Austin in a medical sales job.
A common thread of all those jobs was a high level of stress, but Ware had a constant, ready-made solution.
“Glass is something that always helped improve my mood by giving me a creative outlet,” Ware says. “It was an activity that always improved my mood.”
Eventually the creative, mood-improving outlet won Ware over.
His versatile career over a nearly 30-year span gave Ware plenty of guideposts, as well as a wat to support himself. But he says he always harbored the desire to see where his affinity for glass art could take him.
With strong connections to Lubbock, including an elderly father, Ware finally decided to tap into the artistic vein he had allowed to mostly idle.
After a short detour to North Carolina to engulf himself at a concentrated glassblowing course based on Italian glass techniques, Ware picked up stakes and headed home to West Texas in 2009.
His vision of starting a company based in a hobby had become a passion he wanted to blend with a way to make a living. Now, he uses that vision to provide memories for thousands of people all around the globe, mostly through e-commerce sales.
Without hesitation, Ware proudly points out that Unity in Glass has earned more than 500 5-star reviews from a variety of websites, including WeddingWire.com.
“I came back to Lubbock to open a glassblowing studio and wanted to give it five years,” Ware says. “Each career step I’ve taken has moved me to the next one. I was able to learn marketing, how to assimilate the business structure I needed, and that has really provided me a foundation for running a sound small business. It’s been an odd career path, but there are definitely dotted lines that connect everything I have done and it seems to work.”
Part of that foundation was the return to Lubbock, which is something the well-traveled Ware appreciates.
“Lubbock is a great place to make art,” he says.
Oftentimes in life and business, worlds collide, and a perfect scenario begins to take shape. Lucas Pinkerton and two of his passions did just that in late 2015 and so far, that scenario is intact and has a promising future.
Pinkerton, a 36-year-old Lubbock native, is blunt about two of the biggest loves of his life, right after Heather Pinkerton, his wife and a Lubbock Police Department Police Officer: making rum and his hometown.
When the chance arose for those two elements to intersect, Pinkerton launched Lubbock-based Pinkerton’s Distillery, which produces and distributes true Texan rum.
“I have always wanted to start my own business,” says Pinkerton, who graduated from Frenship High School and then Texas Tech in 2014. “I have a (degree) from TTU and a passion for making alcohol. I was introduced to homebrewing beer when I was 19. I fell in love with it and learned how to make tasty beverages. When looking at what kind of business to start, I really wanted to make rum. So, I did my due diligence and found that Lubbock did not have anything like that within a four-hour drive, pretty much any direction you went.”
After perseverance and plenty of blood, sweat, tears and money, Pinkerton put Pinkerton's Distillery in motion in December 2015, and the first shipment left the facility two months later.
There is no shortage of pride when Pinkerton describes just how Texan his product is.
Pinkerton’s offers three types/flavors of rum: platinum, coconut and gold rum. Each has a distinctive flavor.
“Our Rums are Texas made,” Pinkerton says. “The molasses comes from the Rio Grande Valley in South Texas, the bottles come from Laredo, and the labels are printed locally.”
And the local market has taken notice. Although the rum is available all over the state, the Hub City is the biggest connoisseur.
“Lubbock has picked up on it really well,” says Pinkerton. “Great Plains Distributors is my distributor and they are locally owned. Lots of locally owned package stores have picked it up to sell in their stores. Locally owned bars and restaurants like The Library, The Garden, Blue Light, Tom’s Daiquiris, Local, Jake's Sports Bar, and 50th Street Caboose, have also picked it up and made special drinks.”
That aspect of his company’s early growth doesn’t surprise Pinkerton at all. As a member of the Texas Shrine Association, Pinkerton sees how his hometown community cares about people, and the fact that Lubbock embraces a homegrown business fits that personality.
“Lubbock is my hometown; I was born and raised here, so starting a business here was natural,” Pinkerton says. “The way the city has really embraced our product and what we’re doing really inspires me.”
