Its tough to know where to start with this one. All the way in the beginning, I used to work at a little independent optical shop in Beacon NY (great people, I still love them all very much). When I was working there, I encouraged them to bring on a particular company.. The sales rep for this particular company was a guy named Jonathan. Tall dude, cool guy, always wearing a bandana.. After our second trunk show together, Jonathan and I had our first real conversation. I confided in him my plans to move up north and open up soma, and he told me that he wanted to start his own eyewear brand named Tejesta.

It always makes my smile when I see his brand in my store, I’m proud of him for sticking the landing and making “actually good glasses”. There’s a lot of garbage out there, and I am very serious about not carrying any garbage in my shop*. Anyway, fast forward to quarantine, and all of a sudden I have a lot more time to resume relationships with other people. The first year of soma was very pedal to the metal and Alissa and I never really had time to look up, so it was actually a nice change of pace in a very morbid sort of way.

Anyway, Jonathan and I started talking a lot more. We would talk about about a lot of random stuff, but it would also always circle around to business stuff,, giving advice to each other, and bouncing ideas off of each other. We really both couldn’t wait until we could start doing things again, and began talking about all of the collaborations we would do together. We figured a good place to start would be to do a Tejesta pop up at soma when it felt safe, and see how it went. Many more calls turned into designing a t-shirt together, as well as further collaborative projects we would pursue down the line.

The t-shirt was an awesome collaboration. It was a simple idea, I design the back, Jonathan designs the front. I decided to go with a psychedelic cactus theme, because I like psychedelics, and all of the plays on “vision” being an optician and all. And I used cacti because people kept bringing me cacti to the shop. I never asked for any cacti, but they kept coming in. Serendipitously, cacti also make up a part of jonathans theme too, having a brand that is influenced by native American culture and all. I mean, I guess its really not that huge of a deal when I type it out and read it back to myself, but I was excited. It had been awhile since I had collaborated with anybody but my wife, and it was exciting to see Jonathan and I worked well together. But yeah, we both designed a really cool t-shirt that summed up and joined our brands really nicely..

I don’t think I mentioned, but the t-shirt was for this event we were going to do together. and it was one of the things that were on “the list” for the event. Everything got done pretty quickly and undramatically. I credit that to Jonathan, he has a really good t shirt guy. The plane tickets were bought, and the t shirts were made, and somewhere in between I needed to refresh one of the aforementioned cacti that was gifted to me.

Jill from Hudson, along with her wonderful crew, gifted Alissa and I a wonderful cactus arrangement sometime around the time we opened. We adored it, but I was really terrible at taking care of cacti, so it unfortunately died a very long drawn out death. Its demise punctuated by the death rattle that was covid and us not being around the shop to sprinkle water on it from time to time. That’s a fancy way of saying the cactus died.

Obviously I couldn’t just have a big cactus themed event with a dead cactus in the middle of the table, so I asked Jill where she got the cactus so I could go about getting it repotted. She told me she got it at Niche. I picked up the cactus, and headed to Niche.

There’s this guy named Adam that works at Niche. He just immediately stood out, something about his voice, and enthusiasm and demeanor.. Just one of those people you like immediately. He was engaging, and repotted my cactus for me while I went back to work. By the end of the day, I had a nice fresh cactus in my shop. I explained to Adam that this beautiful arrangement he had handed me was also, unfortunately doomed. Adam wasn’t having it, he insisted on stopping by and teaching me how to take care of it until I was comfortable taking care of it on my own (seriously, who does that?). I had also mentioned that I had a huge birds of paradise that had been in sad shape for the last year, and he offered to come by soma and check it out and help me repot it. He came over after work and we got to work. Before I knew it (which was roughly a week and a half after meeting Adam), we had a full cactus arrangement in the window, featuring the gnarliest (and only) pencil cactus I have ever seen . We also turned a vintage apothecary case into a cactus terrarium. Adam and I went on a whole cactus adventure.

Somewhere along that adventure I met his friend Q. Turns out Q is opening the first black owned plant shop in New England (Emerald City Plant Shop). She is super smart, and just a generally rad young no bullshit independent business woman. I feel strongly about supporting her new business. I really like Q and Adam. They hooked me up with plants, and have been helping teach me how to take care of them. Turns out you can totally under water a cactus by the way.

By the time Jonathan was here, I had invited Q to pop up with us, and she had the brilliant idea to have a make your own cactus stand, where people could pick some cactus friends and a pot, and Q would whip it up in an arrangement for them on the spot.

I had also invited Alaina to join us for the pop up. Alaina runs a vintage clothing company called “Lady of Lizard” , and she curates really rare and special vintage pieces. She is a good culture fit with us, and she is also a patient of ours. We always get along really well, she has a super easygoing and relaxing vibe, and we had talked about doing a pop up together for a very very long time.

It felt weird doing an event in the not quite post Covid world (if there will even ever be such a thing). Though it was really nice being able to get together with some old friends and start welcoming life back in the shop. To be honest it was a bit of a test run. I was half afraid I was going to wind up, as my mom says “a social piranha”. Its really nice to report back that is not the case. We had a pretty solid turn out. The shop is big, and people rotated through, so there was plenty of space, and nobody seemed particularly uncomfortable. It was a nice thing to see and hopefully a sign of things to come. It was so nice seeing people again, and it is so nice to be able to start thinking about doing events again. It had been such a long time, and events really were one of our favorite things. Its good to report that there seems to be many more events in our future. I am very excited to share more information about the next one in the near future.

In summary, everybody had a great time. I made some new friends, made some cool t shirts, and came up with a lot of very exciting future plans with Jonathan. (Nothing that’s ready to be shared just yet, but the type of stuff that gets me real excited, even more than a really cool t-shirt). I even got to experience some hope, a sigh of relief that there might finally be some normalcy after everything that happened. Most importantly of all, I am never going to kill another cactus as long as I live.

Thanks Adam and Q!

. *What makes a pair of glasses good, is basically being the greater sum of its parts. That in itself is a whole other post, but a brief list would be: Concept, construction, execution, feel, hinges, durability, ergonomics, design..

Tejesta x Soma