Get to Know Spartan Shop's Currie Person
We can’t help but think about all the changes in our industry and culture over the last few years. In an effort to better understand this time and how it effects our community, we started a series of interviews with some of our favorite clients and collaborators from the past 15 years in business.
Our first interview was with one of our earliest clients, Lauren Geremia, and this month, we had the pleasure to chat with Currie Person of Spartan Shop whom we’ve known since the early days of both of our businesses.
Currie started her first iteration of Spartan in her hometown of Austin, Texas in 2008. She now runs an evolved version with her “small but mighty" team in Portland, Oregon, where she represents over 30 artists and designers including Grain.
We tried to keep it brief, but in all honesty, we didn’t want the call to end. We cover everything from pivoting in a pandemic to stewarding a historic home to living with art and design and children to Currie’s love language of late-night travel-itinerary-making. More hangs are definitely in our future.
If you find yourself in Pacific Northwest soon, Spartan has some exciting shows upcoming: Kim Gronquist opening on March 14th, Cody Hoyt opening on May 9th, and in July, John Gnorski.
Chelsea: What inspired you to originally start Spartan and then eventually relocate to Portland?
Currie: I moved back to my hometown of Austin after working as a location scout for more than a decade in film production. Feeling nostalgic for neighborhood shops in New York and Paris, I decided to take a very uneducated swing at retail, opening Spartan in a tiny space in 2008. Our focus was handmade/independent design for the home—a rarity back then. In the late aughts, the majority of options were just these big box stores and not much on the web. In 2011, we moved the online part of our business to Portland, when my husband and I relocated here while retaining the Austin storefront. In 2015, we opened our Portland showroom.
Chelsea: During the pandemic, Spartan pivoted to a gallery; reduced open public hours; and started to carry more art objects, furniture, and lighting. What inspired that shift?
Currie: Prior to the pandemic we had already been moving towards representing more art and artist collections, primarily in ceramics, a deep passion of ours. With everyone spending so much time at home, our clients were inspired to re-think the spaces where they lived. Demand for art, furniture, and lighting grew precipitously. When we started in 2008, there were limited choices for small handmade home/tabletop goods. By the time we moved to Portland, shops representing these areas were in every medium to large city and all over the web. We couldn’t be more excited and encouraged by this shift in the market, but, it became rigorous to keep our inspiration up, feeling redundant. So, there was a natural transition towards bigger things, art, and more one-of-a-kind pieces.
Chelsea: Who is the Spartan client? Architects and interior designers? Based in the Northwest or from larger cities?
Currie: We have a mix of local, national and international. Before 2020, a large swath of our clientele was local or folks visiting Portland, although, online was already quite significant. During the pandemic, we observed that clients became markedly more confident ordering online and our business grew across the US, and internationally. We love working with interior designers and architects, as well as direct clients. We aim to build long-standing relationships on a foundation of thoughtful, kind communication and trust. Once individual clients or firms become familiar with our curatorial perspective, standards for quality and craftsmanship, and elevated level of service, we tend to see them return often for new projects. This is the highest of compliments. We do not take it for granted.
Chelsea: What role does photography play in presenting offerings at Spartan? I know you shoot everything yourself. Does this come from your film background?
Currie: Practical photography is part of my background as a location scout. Shooting collections myself in our space is convenient, but it's also about conveying the authentic feel of each object.
Chelsea: It’s about honesty, then?
Currie: Yeah. So I shoot in natural light. An upshot of the loooooong rainy season in the Pacific Northwest is that we have all of this beautiful diffused light. I have so many friends who are professional photographers, so I feel a bit queasy and embarrassed by my highly untrained skills, but I do know what I want to come across. The feel of the photos is part of what we are, and it is comforting to know that when you're looking across the web and see a picture that's taken by us, you associate it with us because we've been doing it in the same way for so long. My janky photography is now part of our brand.
Chelsea: Yeah, and too that it exists in the real world in a real place. It's hard to decipher sometimes now.
Currie: Absolutely. There are so many photos that make things look so beautiful and appealing in a way that is not true to the materiality of the piece or anything else. All of these incredible glazes and firing techniques that these ceramists use are so poetic and lovely, you have to capture the texture and dimensionality to fully communicate the piece. So that's what I strive for. Not that I am always able to capture it.
Chelsea: How large is your team?
Currie: There are three other women who work with me, a tight-knit small team but very much a family. Ivy, my co-pilot, has been with me since she graduated from college. She's in her early 30s now and has as much involvement in everything as I do. It's a small but mighty team, and everyone's here in Portland.
Chelsea: Do you all work in the same space?
Currie: We have a lot of flexibility. The pandemic presented an opening to reshape the way we manage our time and we took it. We prioritize balance, flexibility, travel, childcare, time with pets, self-care, etc, while still managing to get the work done.
Chelsea: Yeah, your team, the energy from the group emails is always really elevated and positive. There is a beautiful vibration to it all.
Currie: I’m so glad that translates. I think that is truly how we are. My team gives so much and so I allocate all the resources and energy I can to supporting them. We all love food and travel and art, we laugh a lot. We work hard but take it all with a grain of salt. I think we all feel fortunate to do what we do.
Chelsea: Can you tell me a little bit about your own home and how you live with art and design there? I read somewhere that you have a lot of seconds.
Currie: Yes, there are a lot of broken and repaired pieces in my house, artwork or furniture that was damaged in shipping but that are so exquisite that we couldn’t bear to dispose of them. There are also gorgeous pieces that I have collected and been gifted from the artists and designers we work with.
Our house is quite a special place, built in 1962 by Saul Zaik, a regional Pacific Northwest modernist, perched up on a hill with views of all the mountains. We ended up with the opportunity to buy it due to some of incredible combination of luck and timing. We feel like stewards of this beautiful land and architecture. It has a little guest studio for our artists to stay, providing a way for me to get to know them as friends as well as collaborators.
Chelsea: How do you balance having a space for kids that doesn't look like a kid's space?
Currie: If you can see in the back of this room, there's a pile of cups that my son left stacked up this morning. It's definitely a kid house.
He was a wild younger kid, but being in the gallery and around these things becomes part of your DNA - this spatial awareness around objects. Anything broken in our house has been the adults breaking it. Now he has started making objects and all the time he is creating sculptures, intuitively influenced by the stuff around him.
Chelsea: What I really want to get to is your relationship with travel. Can you tell me more about how you weave all of your trips into the mix? How do you manage your responsibilities of running this business and motherhood into all of your travel?
Currie: It's a 15-year plan that has started culminating of late. Both my husband's business and Spartan grew a lot during the pandemic, allowing us to work remotely. Our amazing staff can run things when we're not there, and our kid is in a good spot. We're seizing the moment, planning as much travel as we can, aware that circumstances could change at any moment.
Ivy and I go on trips twice a year to scout for artists and have one-on-one time away from daily constraints, to dream together. As long as we can afford it, we'll continue. We've been to London and Paris, Milan, and have plans for Berlin. I took the entire crew to Mexico after the pandemic as a thank-you for all their hard work. Travel has always been my greatest pleasure. My love language is giving you a travel list from a place that I've been. I will stay up all night making it perfect, or curating it to your desires. I suppose, once a location scout, always a location scout.
Chelsea: Could it be a spin-off business?
Currie: A piece of personal wisdom that age has brought me: just because I love something or have a talent for it, doesn't mean I should try to make money doing it. There's this huge capitalist pressure to monetize our passions. It certainly is an enormous luxury working in an area that I love and I have managed to hold on to that enthusiasm in Spartan, navigating its focus as my/our collective interests changed. But turning a passion into a business can rob it of all the joy. I think we can hold some things a little bit sacred.
Chelsea: Things have been weird for a lot of business owners in our industry over the past few years, how are you thinking about the next few years and beyond for Spartan?
Currie: I started in 2008, knowing nothing about retail and that was the year that a terrifying amount of retail businesses folded. We started small and slow and incrementally grew. There was a point when I got over-extended, expanded to partnerships in San Francisco and LA, and drank the “growth is king” Kool-Aid. When I had my son, I thought, I do not want all this. We simplified just to Portland. It's like reducing a sauce to its most essential ingredients: having the best staff, allocating as many resources as I can to care for and support them, keeping overhead reasonable, and frequently reminding ourselves to stay as flexible and nimble as we can.
I don’t have a corporate-world job with corresponding benefits and salary, part of my “pay” is freedom. I frequently share this with friends who are in a similar situation. If you're not taking advantage of that free time or freedom to travel etc, even if it's just taking a walk when it's beautiful or going swimming in the middle of your day, then you are losing out on both a bigger, perhaps more dependable salary and the freedom.
Chelsea: That's really helpful. Thank you. We have a similar philosophy, but it's nice to hear it echoed from your point of view. It's an important reminder.