This is an I-Heart podcast.

And we continue with our American stories.

And now we bring you the story of Allegory Handcrafted Goods, a Chicago-based

pen, and leather goods company. Here's the founder, Chad Schumacher, to tell us their story.

One question I've heard more often than any other since starting allegory is, well,

how'd you get into that?

Granted, making pens from historical woods and leather goods inlaid with ancient fabrics is

certainly a strange enough idea for a company to elicit that kind of question.

I usually just smile and give a few sentence answer about my dad teaching me about pens and the rest just sort of happening.

But the whole story is much more, well, it's just more.

In summer of 2011, my wife Jess and I were both working at a tech startup.

We just announced that we expected our first child.

And at the time, we were both driving luxury cars, living in the stereotypical suburban dream house.

The starter home we lived in when we got married made a nice rental property that usually paid its own bills.

We didn't have huge salaries or savings, but we had stock in a company we were helping build that we hoped

would be worth millions relatively soon. We had some credit card debt from our efforts to keep up

with our business peers and more traditional companies, but all in all, we had life by the tail.

My parents were retired and had gotten back together after a divorce, and they were excited

to become full-time babysitters to their first grandchild.

What happened over the rest of that year would dismantle all of those things, and it would teach

me that sometimes things have to fall apart before they can really come together.

The company Jess and I worked at had been sort of a proving ground for me.

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