When is a table more than a table? When it used to be a row house. (Okay, we’ll explain.)

Two years ago, a partnership formed among Habitat for Humanity, the U.S. Green Building Council, and Under Armour to build Baltimore’s first LEED Platinum certified home (the highest attainable for green building standards) in Sandtown. One of the requirements is that the builders must reuse and/or recycle the majority of material waste. So Will Phillips, head of Under Armour’s Green Program and an organizer in the Habitat project, sought out John Bolster, president of New Renaissance Architects and Builders, to reuse the salvaged lumber from the Habitat home in a creative way—making furniture. Sandtown Millworks was born.

The furniture was so sturdy and uniquely attractive that Phillips and Bolster decided to use more salvaged wood from other construction/demolition projects. “These trees started growing in the Revolutionary War era, if not before,” Phillips explains. “They have this beautiful wood grain and incredible density, which is why they are still in great shape after holding a building up for one hundred plus years. We can’t stand the thought of them rotting in a landfill.”

The duo plan to open a showroom later this year but, for now, shoppers can get their furniture fix through appointments at their Federal Hill workshop or at the JFX Farmers’ Market.

“People from Baltimore love it,” says Bolster. “It distills a lot of the character of each building into one piece of furniture. We keep the design simple and let the wood and its history stand out.”

http://www.sandtownmillworks.com

Koren Ray Brewer’s brain is deep in spring this February afternoon—spring 2009.

The senior vice president of merchandising and marketing for Hobo International handbags is in her office taking a call about the Annapolis-based company. She’s just left a meeting with her design team where they shared the bits of fabric, magazine pictures, and sketches they hope will forecast what kinds of handbags women will want to carry a year from now.

“It’s an exciting process, but kind of scary trying to crystal ball what colors and trends will be important and how we will fit ourselves into what will be up and coming,” says Koren, 41.

But it’s not as scary as it used to be.

Since Koren helped her mother, Toni Ray, start the company in 1991 with the idea that women want handbags full of little pockets and compartments, they’ve built a loyal following. “Whether we’ve followed the runway trends 100 percent or not, we have a trust factor from customers that this is a look that’s right,” says Koren.

Toni cashed in her IRA to start the company after losing her job of 20 years at Georgetown Leather Design in Washington, D.C. She says she decided to sell the company to Koren and her husband David Brewer two years ago because she knew it was time for it to grow. “People wanted to buy the business, but the kids said they really wanted it,” says Ray, 67, talking by phone from her home with a view of the ocean in Miami’s South Beach.

Since taking the helm, Koren and her husband David Brewer have aimed the company, long known for its fashionable function, toward becoming a lifestyle brand. “I think we’re definitely on track for big things, for growth,” says David, 44, the company’s president. The belts and eye wear products they’ve recently added have been well received. “I think we are going to grow this into a lifestyle brand that will include other categories like footwear and apparel.”

In Hobo’s first year of business, sales reached $400,000. This past year, annual sales exceeded $30 million. They have 42 employees, showrooms in New York City, Los Angeles, and Atlanta and their bags are sold in Nordstrom, Bloomingdale’s, and specialty stores throughout the U.S., the U.K., Japan, and Canada.

Along the way, they ramped up the fashion, but they never lost the function. Hobo’s Director of Design Martha Radford, 55, first met Toni when she wandered into Georgetown Leather Design in the 70’s to buy a handbag and ended up taking a job there. Radford joined Hobo in the mid-90’s and brought innovations that beat some of the big names to market. “We started with wristlets before people were doing those around 2000. We were the first people to do frames,” says Radford of the hinged and structured bags that often close with a clasp. “It seemed like the natural thing two years ago. I got the idea of frames from old vintage handbags.”

Today, Hobo’s double frame clutches in hot orange and metallic python print share display space with familiar names like Coach, Kate Spade, and Botkier at the Towson Nordstrom. Hobo bags have been photographed adorning stars like Eva Longoria Parker and Sarah Jessica Parker.

But the brand doesn’t bank on flash. “They’re very functional. They’re understated,” says Toni. “We don’t hang Hobo tags off of them. We like to have the style, look, and quality that say Hobo.”

And while the price of some of Hobo’s competitors flirt with luxury levels, the average price of a Hobo bag is between $200 and $250. “They fill in well between my really high-end more expensive pieces where someone might not want to spend $500 on a handbag, but is willing to spend $200 or less,” says Form owner Aimee Bracken, who carries Hobo bags in her Hampden boutique. “I like that when mom comes in with her daughter, she can get her daughter a Hobo bag while mom gets a $600 Vera Wang dress.”

But she also likes their colors and function. She owns one of Hobo’s Sadie wallets, a long wallet with a tiny retro coin purse that tucks into an inside pocket. “Oh my gosh, I love that thing,” says Bracken. “My change stays in that coin purse perfectly.”

Fern Elliott of Lilac Bijoux carries the Hobo line in her Baltimore and Annapolis accessory stores and a Hobo clutch in her daily life. “Once you have one, you just want to keep it,” she says.

“Hobo has for many, many years been a well-kept secret,” says Koren of the company that has done almost no advertising. “When you find a customer who is passionate about Hobo, they really are passionate about it.”

Koren is wrapping things up this Friday afternoon, getting ready to take her husband and two boys Luca, 7, and Theo, 5, to join her mother on a vacation in Miami. “I miss having her here on a daily basis,” Koren says of Toni who recently married long-time friend Wallace Shaw and now divides her time between Florida and Annapolis. But she is still always available with advice. “I check in with her all the time,” says Koren. “She’s still involved in strategic decisions.”

Toni says she thinks her children are doing fine on their own. “Things are organized now, and that was never true with me,” she says.

Koren remembers when her mother was learning the business at Georgetown Leather Design. She would spend Saturday afternoons playing under the workbench where they made the belts and sandals. “I’d keep busy playing with the leather tools,” she says.

David has been with Hobo from the beginning. He met Koren when they were both working at the Middleton Tavern in downtown Annapolis. David had just returned to his family’s home in Annapolis after a 10-year sojourn in Greece where he earned a degree in marketing from The American University of Athens and ran a hotel and restaurant. Koren had just graduated from Northwestern University where she had studied theater design and acting and hoped to direct movies someday.

Initially, David’s job was keeping “an eye on the bottom line,” he says. “Toni was the creative and selling force.” He kept a close watch on their pricing structure and the deals they made. But his mechanical skills are the ones that might have been most useful early on.

Toni and Koren needed a way to get their early products to trade shows in New York. David found a 1970’s Chevy van listed for $150 in the local paper. He pulled Hobo International’s first corporate asset out of the woods behind someone’s house with four flat tires and a cracked engine compartment.

“It was 150 degrees in the summertime and freezing in the winter,” he says, “So much heat and exhaust would come through this thing, we had to drive with the windows down.” They called it “The Heater” and during those early years it hauled them and the display booths they’d painted with a Mexican hacienda-theme in Toni’s garage to the trade shows.

The couple loved the 15 years they spent working out of Toni’s renovated cottage home on the Chesapeake Bay. “There were as many as 10 of us working in the dining room with computers and bags stacked up to the ceiling,” says Koren. Her mother’s home was also the scene of their 1999 formal garden wedding—an event they were finally able to squeeze in between trade shows. Now they live in a house just two doors down from Toni in a Chesapeake Bay resort community. “Being in Annapolis gives us a real world perspective from a design standpoint,” says David. Hobo’s corporate offices now reside in an unsightly two-story building on Bay Ridge Avenue, a few miles from downtown.

Ideas for bag designs come from things they see going on in the market in the U.S. and from places like France, Italy, and Japan where trends germinate early. The spring line hitting stores now includes an edgy design with straps that criss-cross and antique silver hardware. But the line also has soft feminine bags with touches right out of ready-to-wear like ruching, ruffles, and pleats.

For the upcoming fall collection, Radford says she was inspired by a trip to Philadelphia last summer to see the King Tut exhibit. The turquoise, cobalt blue, and metallic hues resonated with her. “The Egyptians had a very forward color palette. You just get a sense of what’s happening in color just by looking all around you.”

The forecast for spring 2009 will bring her back a little closer to where she began, creating bags out of natural leathers for the hip denizens of 1970’s Georgetown. “Natural leathers are coming back in a big way,” says Radford. “There’s sort of a naked and whole sort of artisan look that will be important along with color.”

They might beat the big names to market with these trends. But that isn’t their aim.

“I really think that what we go for is the essence of fashion that is attainable, an everyday kind of fashion that works well with your existing wardrobe,” says Koren. “The lifestyle is about helping you to complete your look, but by your own rules.”

This is the story of a dad, his wife, their five sons (and five spouses), their seven grandchildren, and $50 million dollars. It has all the elements of a gripping modern day drama—money, family, and real estate. But this is no trust fund fiasco, no tale of ruined fortunes and misspent lives. Instead, it’s the tale of the Buscher family, and how Dave Buscher saw a business windfall as an opportunity to create a family of entrepreneurs—one start-up at a time.

Dave Buscher is a steak-and-potato man. But he’s also a millionaire—and right now he’s a millionaire who’s getting his butt kicked. That’s kind of the point at the Owings Mills Krav Maga studio (Krav Maga is a self-defense technique originally developed for Israeli defense forces). Slightly winded from being pummeled by a bunch of (much younger) students, Buscher, 61, more than holds his own. And no one holds back—even though Buscher owns the joint. Following the multi-million-dollar sale of his defense contracting company to a major military supplier, the white-haired, slightly cantankerous, but soft-spoken Buscher decided to invest the money back into his family—including himself. Buscher owns this studio, plus another one in Columbia. After reading about Krav Maga in an airplane magazine, Buscher came looking for training. When he didn’t find anything, “I did what I do in other cases—I started one of my own.”
He’s always been a hard worker. Buscher got his undergrad degree at Villanova University, outside of Philadelphia. That was followed by a master’s degree in electrical engineering at the University of Maryland, and a master’s degree in systems engineering and technical management at Johns Hopkins. He worked at the Harry Diamond Laboratories (now the Army Research Lab), and then spent 17 years at JHU’s Applied Physics Laboratory.
In 1996, he co-founded Solipsys, a sensory integration company. Basically, says Buscher, they took different radars that had overlapping coverage and built a system that would let those radars create a single picture. Business was good—then came September 11, 2001. Demand for the company’s work took off; the sale to military contractor Raytheon was consummated in 2003. And suddenly, Buscher had tens of millions of dollars in his bank account. He also had a plan for what to do with the money.
His kids all remember it differently—how Dad first approached them with his plan—but eventually the message made its way around the family. “I challenged them all to come up with an idea,” says Buscher. If they put together a business plan, he’d hear it out. Word spread amongst the Buscher boys: David, 35; Mike, 33; Steve, 32; Christopher, 30; and Tim, 29. “I always wanted the kids to have the ability to be entrepreneurs,” says Dave. “To make their fortune and not necessarily have to work for someone else.”
The do-it-yourself spirit began early in the Buscher household. As the family outgrew their Silver Spring home in the early 1980’s, Dave started building a house in Clarksville with the help of a couple friends and some contractors; of course, the boys were put to work.
“I was 13 and hammering and plastering,” says David. “It was our family project for a couple years.” He remembers eating microwave hot dogs while they worked—”it was the only thing we ate for a year.” The house was completed in 1985.
“I have memories of being in sixth grade and hammering our plywood floors,” says Mike. “It was very much a family effort to build that house.”
His parents, says David, seem to thrive on chaos. They had five children in seven years. And once the boys started moving out, his mom, Lauretta, “would replace everyone with a dog,” says David. “For a while, she had this pack of dogs at the house.”
The brothers share a lot of similarities: smart, private, and focused. For many of them, their wives play a dominant role both at home and at work—spearheading the businesses that were born out of this proposal.

First out of the gate were Katie and Tim. They bought Crazy Lil’s, a bar in Federal Hill, in January 2003. “We had a couple of false starts trying to find the right place,” says Dave Buscher. Crazy Lil’s was the third or fourth opportunity. “That was the only business that was already operating. All the other businesses started from scratch.” Tim had no food service experience—he quit his job at Verizon to run the bar—but Katie had worked in restaurant management. “I think when we first told Dave we were going to buy a bar he thought we were crazy,” says Katie, 28, especially when, three months later, they found out she was pregnant. Tim quickly learned about food preparation and bartending since Katie couldn’t keep up with the late nights and smoky atmosphere.
They still own the bar, and it’s finally turning a profit, says Katie. Lil’s, she adds, prepared them for the next step: an upscale steakhouse in Fulton that sits at the intersection of routes 216 and 29. They spent a year planning oZ—pronounced “Oh-Zee”—Chophouse, and opened in September 2006. “This is ours from top to bottom,” says Katie, looking around the restaurant. They chose everything from the silverware to the soap dispensers in the bathroom. (Their second child was born two weeks before they opened. “We have really bad timing,” Katie says.)
Timing is just part of the learning process. And so are the mandatory monthly board meetings that Buscher instituted. Initially, everyone was skeptical. “I said, ‘I don’t want to sit around and tell everyone how much my store is making and how I pay my staff,'” remembers Lindsay Buscher, who along with husband Chris owns Urban Chic, a fashion boutique. But they had no choice. Now, she says, “it’s probably one of the smartest things we could have done.”
Everything is discussed, from finances to problem employees to merging suppliers. Buscher says there is no point in each business making the same mistake over and over again. And there are no secrets. “It makes everyone aware that what they do affects everyone else,” says Buscher, who attends some meetings, but not all of them. It’s now their show to run.

And so far, so good. Chris and Lindsay are at the helm of a boutique empire. They met their last semester at Salisbury University and fell in love, they joke, over their freak knowledge of Contra, a Nintendo game. When Dave’s offer was made, both Lindsay, 29, and Chris were working full-time, in addition to getting master’s degrees and planning a wedding. Chris had taken his degree in graphic design and gone to work for his dad at Solipsys—the only one of the brothers to do so. Lindsay was at Northrop Grumman and had just been accepted into the Women & Politics Institute at American University.
Instead, she opened her first Urban Chic in February 2004 in Georgetown.
With the money they borrowed, Lindsay and Chris were able to afford the real estate. “I think that Georgetown store was one of the most important decisions in our lives,” she says. They had discussed other locations, like Towson, “but I think if we had done that we wouldn’t be where we are now.”
Georgetown is a tricky place. As shopping destinations go, it’s one of the best. But for a small, independently operated boutique competing with established upscale shops like Barney’s Co-Op, Neiman Marcus’ Cusp, and Intermix—well, it’s a difficult thing. Especially for an inexperienced first-timer. The shop’s location, upper Wisconsin Avenue (known as Book Hill), is also a few miles off M Street’s main hub.
An omen of the store’s future came early: The night before they opened, a woman begged to come in and shop. She bought $5,000 worth of merchandise—in cash.
Chris called his father. “We just made our first sale,” he told him.
Today, the original Georgetown store continues to thrive (and “we are killing last year [sales],” says Lindsay). Chris and Lindsay opened their second Urban Chic at Maple Lawn outside Columbia in November 2005. They developed an online presence. They’ll open in Bethesda next spring. A developer in Annapolis is courting them. And Gaylord Hotels will be opening more incarnations of their boutique at two locations, including the highly touted National Resort & Convention Center (the “National Harbor” project) in Prince George’s County. “Lindsay has a passion for what she does,” says Michael Hudson, brand projects manager for Gaylord Hotels. “Her existing boutiques speak for themselves. She and her family have poured their heart and soul into them.”
Closer to home, the Harbor East location—nestled between Fells Point and the Inner Harbor—will open next month. Baltimore, they confess, was not on the radar screen. But it was Lindsay’s sister—living in Baltimore at the time—who saw the buildings going up around Whole Foods, and urged her to look into the new, upscale neighborhood. Lindsay called a leasing agent on a Sunday expecting to leave a message. “Oh my God,” the agent said to her. “I was going to call you tomorrow.”
When they open the doors in August (in the former Nouveau Contemporary Goods location), the store will house 2,900 square feet of home goods, clothes for women, men, and kids, and some maternity wear. One of the keys to Urban Chic’s success is the build-out—which is the process of finishing the raw space. This includes building walls, designing dressing rooms, selecting floors, and picking paint colors. “It could kill us because of the money we put into it.
But if we don’t do the build-out, we end up being like every other boutique,” says Lindsay. “And that’s what makes us stand out—and yeah, it’s going to take us a couple more years to pay that money back, but it’s worth it.”

If you ask any of the Buschers, this is the hardest they’ve ever worked. Owning a business—no matter where the funding comes from—takes countless hours. “You have to really love what you do,” says Nicholas Johnson, of owning a small business. His stores Su Casa, Calligaris by Pad, and Dudley & Max dominate Fells Point. “I can be at work seven days a week, 24 hours a day and not be bored.” But hard work doesn’t necessarily mean you’re raking in the money.
Buscher does not take a percentage of the profits. “It’s one of those things we pay back once we’re starting to make money,” says Lindsay. “His goal is to get us there so we are profitable.” And everyone claims there is no competition. No weighing of who got what. It’s just understood that a boutique would need more funding than, say, a photography business.
Buscher sets up shop almost daily in his satellite office—the bar at oZ—checking e-mails and making phone calls. The family now employs an accountant, Didi Cohen, whose sole job is managing Buscher Family Holdings, the entity that all the businesses fall under. “I can’t even put into words what we’ve learned these past three years,” says Lindsay. “We made so many mistakes that first year we would have had to close our store. There is no way we would have survived.” That seems to be the cushion that Buscher has created for his kids. According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, over 50 percent of small businesses fail within their first five years. And while none of the Buscher businesses have hit the five-year mark yet, they’ve been able to survive early mistakes because they’re not worried about foreclosing on their houses or owing money to the bank.
This seems especially important for some of the businesses that have struggled early on, like David Buscher’s bluehouse, a 7,000-square-foot shop on the cusp of Harbor East in the old Broom Corn building. The concept of bluehouse is “healthy and eco-friendly living”; everything in the store, from the drinks to the furniture, has to meet a certain criteria from sustainable to recyclable.
And it’s not easy being green. It’s harder to find vendors, especially ones that can deal in large quantities. The store—which sells home furnishings and gifts—can sometimes look mismatched because small vendors aren’t unified in terms of theme or even seasons. “We just hope to make up for that with the other aspects,” says David. After bluehouse announced plans to utilize wind power to compensate for energy use—and received some press—the National Aquarium contacted them about designing a lounge.
David attended Johns Hopkins, and lived in Chicago and New York before finally settling back in Baltimore three years ago. When the offer came to start his own business, he decided to move home. “I wanted to create something that wouldn’t be destructive or harmful,” he says. So he seized on the eco-friendly idea. Bluehouse opened its doors in December 2005. Like his brothers, it’s a family affair. David’s partner Rob Hartmann, 41, helped with bluehouse’s conceptualization, planning, and logistics in the early stages.
Businesses are funded all the time, he says, but most have to start at a more modest level. Because of his father, “we were able to start with a bigger bang than if we had to evolve.” And because the money was coming from a personal source—”I don’t think anyone else would have been crazy enough to give me the money”—David says he didn’t have to justify where every cent was going. It’s been a slow process with a big learning curve. “I wasn’t used to dealing with a lot of money,” he says. “I had never seen that much in my entire life.” He still sounds a bit dazed.
His plans for the future are still fuzzy—”assuming we get to be very profitable, of course”—but include expansion or green consulting. “I think it’ll be another year before I’m satisfied that all of our systems are right in terms of how we buy, what we buy, how we operate.” He seems the most worried about his prospects. “My family’s resources are very tied into what I’m doing here,” says David. “So, if for some reason we should go out of business or something—it not only affects me—it’s my entire family. It’ll affect personal things as well as business things.”
At the other end of the spectrum, Kassi and Steve Buscher are having a stellar year: For starters, the Ritz-Carlton recently came calling. The pair opened The Pearl Spa in January 2006; a happy client had mentioned the spa to someone at the luxe hotel group, and after phone calls and a bunch of visits from New York they offered Kassi the coveted spot at the new Ritz-Carlton Residences on Key Highway. If all goes as planned, the second Pearl Spa will open in November—the fourth Buscher business to open in Baltimore city.
Kassi, 35, spent seven years working as a consultant for salons and spas as a distributor. She and Steve got hitched in Vegas six years ago. While visiting a spa after the birth of their daughter, Kassi realized she could do a better job. She approached Dave with her plan. “It’s definitely not a free ticket,” says Kassi. “We’re working hard and we expect to pay everything back.” Now, the 11,000-square-foot spa is an anchor for Maple Lawn with its stunning Blue Grotto treatment, water walls, and blissful lounges. Maple Lawn is a mixed-use community that used to be a turkey farm. Initially it felt like a ghost town with Urban Chic, The Pearl, and lots of empty buildings, but slowly more businesses are moving in, including a Harris Teeter.
And now that oZ has taken up residence—Buscher Lawn Farms they joke—Dave has become the unofficial sheriff, mayor, and public relations flak. “It’s been slow growing,” says Kassi. “But this is our best month ever. Every month is better than the last month.”
The kids all joke about Dad’s accelerated MBA program. “I purposefully, in the beginning, let them make some errors because I think that’s a valuable way to learn things,” says Dave. His lessons also include the importance of marketing and lease negotiations. “He throws the responsibility on you—whether or not you’re ready for it,” says Lindsay. “He just wants you to learn really quickly.” And they have. Urban Chic currently has 25 employees, says Chris. If you add up all the Buscher family businesses that number grows to 250—double what Solipsys employed.
The smallest of the businesses are owned by Cate and Mike Buscher. They met in 2002 when both were living in New Jersey. She was an admissions counselor at Fairleigh Dickinson, he was a staff photographer at the Daily Record, and both hailed from Maryland. Before long, they were backpacking around Peru together (her first plane ride). After they got engaged, they quit their jobs and bought a one-way plane ticket to Bangkok. They traveled the world for six months—she’s been to 20 countries, Mike around 43—and in October 2004, were married in his parent’s backyard. “That was a really good glimpse into the wedding business,” says Cate, 27, who now owns Plan It Perfect, a wedding and event planning business. Mike owns the aptly named Mike Buscher Photography where he does a mix of documentary, wedding, corporate, and commercial photography, plus some work for a handful of newspapers. He’s working on a book project and a marketing, graphic design, and advertising agency is in the works. Mike and Cate work out of their apartment in Federal Hill—the former Holy Cross School with soaring ceilings and lingering evidence that they now live in the former gymnasium.
They’re operating on a much smaller scale than the other Buscher businesses—”the black sheep,” laughs Cate. And yet, it’s a perfect fit. There is obvious kinship between a wedding photographer husband and a party planner wife, but also rehearsal dinners are often held at oZ, bachelorette parties at Pearl Spa, honeymoon outfits purchased at Urban Chic.
Perhaps it’s Cate’s more intimate business size that gives her a good long-term look at the prospects for the myriad Buscher family enterprises.
“They will,” she says, “take over the world one day.”