The Family That Rebuilt Their Life One Pen at a Time
Our American Stories
iHeartPodcasts
4.6 • 817 Ratings
🗓️ 28 October 2025
⏱️ 20 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this episode of Our American Stories, in 2011, Chad and Jess Schumacher were working for a growing tech company outside Chicago. They had a new home, a baby on the way, and steady careers that seemed secure. Then the company failed. Within months, their savings were gone, and the life they had planned slipped out of reach. Chad’s father had recently retired and started woodworking with a friend from Vietnam. When his father invited him down to the garage, Chad went. They spent the afternoon turning wood into pens—talking little, working quietly. It was the first calm he had felt in months. That moment stayed with him. Chad kept making pens, and each one sold helped them hold on a little longer. Allegory Handcrafted Goods was born there—a small shop that kept growing even as the family faced illness and loss.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:14.4 | And we continue with our American stories. |
| 0:17.7 | And now we bring you the story of Allegory Handcrafted Goods, a Chicago-based |
| 0:23.4 | pen, and leather goods company. Here's the founder, Chad Schumacher, to tell us their story. |
| 0:33.7 | One question I've heard more often than any other since starting allegory is, well, |
| 0:38.4 | how'd you get into that? |
| 0:40.4 | Granted, making pens from historical woods and leather goods inlaid with ancient fabrics is |
| 0:45.9 | certainly a strange enough idea for a company to elicit that kind of question. |
| 0:51.0 | I usually just smile and give a few sentence answer about my dad teaching me about pens and the rest just sort of happening. |
| 0:57.0 | But the whole story is much more, well, it's just more. |
| 1:03.0 | In summer of 2011, my wife Jess and I were both working at a tech startup. |
| 1:09.0 | We just announced that we expected our first child. and at the time we were both driving luxury cars, |
| 1:14.6 | living in the stereotypical suburban dream house. |
| 1:17.5 | The starter home we lived in when we got married made a nice rental property that usually paid its own bills. |
| 1:22.7 | We didn't have huge salaries or savings, but we had stock in a company we were helping build |
| 1:27.1 | that we hoped |
| 1:27.7 | would be worth millions relatively soon. We had some credit card debt from our efforts to keep up |
| 1:32.9 | with our business peers in more traditional companies, but all in all, we had life by the tail. |
| 1:38.3 | My parents were retired and had gotten back together after a divorce, and they were excited |
| 1:42.6 | to become full-time babysitters to their first grandchild. |
| 1:46.0 | What happened over the rest of that year would dismantle all of those things, and it would teach |
| 1:52.0 | me that sometimes things have to fall apart before they can really come together. |
... |
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