I've scoured Detroit's dumps, streets, and abandoned homes for wood and metal to make furniture. It's exciting to be part of a movement that redefines how society should use reclaimed materials.
- Bo Shepherd, 32, moved to Detroit in 2008 with a dream of designing car interiors.
- Now Shepherd's passion is making furniture from recycled materials found across the city.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Bo Shepherd, 32, about moving to Detroit to design cars and later founding Woodward Throwbacks, which salvages old building materials from around the city and uses them to craft sustainable furniture and home goods. It has been edited for length and clarity.
I'm a first-generation American. My dad is Jamaican, and my mom is Kittitian and Antiguan.
Both of my parents are creative individuals, but their parents didn't support them in pursuing a degree in the arts. They chose to nurture my creativity during childhood, and I was always drawing.
I planned to design cars, which brought me to Detroit
When my dad bought me a PlayStation racing game called Gran Turismo at 11, I became intrigued and started sketching cars. At first, I didn't even know that car design was an actual career or business.
When I was 17, I saw a magazine advertisement for a summer internship program that focused on transportation design. It was my aha moment — I knew this was exactly what I had been waiting for my whole life.
After doing some research, I found out about Detroit's College for Creative Studies (CCS), a leading art school for transportation design.
The rest is history. I moved from New Jersey to Detroit in 2008.
I knew very little about Michigan or the city of Detroit. So before I was accepted, my dad and I hopped into the car and drove nine and a half hours to Michigan.
I remember seeing the landscape of Detroit for the first time and realizing there was a lot of abandonment. It was completely opposite of where I grew up, but I was so intrigued.
Detroit has such a presence, almost a gravitational pull. The culture, architecture and the city's creative scene just made me want to be a part of it — I knew I needed to be here.
The day after my father and I arrived in the city, we toured CCS' campus. I was told by the college's administration office that they had just mailed my acceptance letter. I signed with the school then and there.
In 2011, my junior year at the college, I was accepted into an internship program for General Motors. When I graduated from CCS in 2012, I was hired by the company as a full-time interior designer.
I decided to leave GM to build my own business
I worked at General Motors from 2012 to 2017. During my time with the company, I did interior work for Cadillac, GMC, and Buick, but Chevy was my main brand.
The car industry is a male-dominated, and there are not a lot of women of color. Sometimes you get put into a box. When it comes to the culture, there is still a lot of progress needed.
In 2017, I began weighing the pros and cons of the job. I'm an outside-of-the-box thinker and kind of a rebel. I don't like having limitations or being told no.
Around this time, I really started thinking about Woodward Throwbacks, a passion project my partner Kyle Dubay and I started in 2014. It is a sustainable design studio that custom builds furniture and home goods with recycled materials found in the city.
By 2016, our brand was in Nordstrom and Target. We were also wholesaling around the country. In 2017, we bought a 24,000-square-foot car dealership and transformed it into a showroom, warehouse, and workshop.
That year, I left GM. I was falling out of love with car design, and the possibility of being my own boss excited me. It was the best decision I've ever made in my life.
We have to start thinking about the environment
As a business owner, you sometimes wonder if things are going to work out. Those experiences humble you, but also push you to work harder.
When we started in 2014, Kyle and I had no full-time employees. He ran the business, and I would put in hours after work. Sometimes our roommate would help.
We now work with organizations, demo crews, and community members to save materials from landfills.
Leaving my dream job in the car industry was terrifying but also exciting. I try to live my life without regrets. I think everything that has happened to this point has happened for a reason.
What Woodward Throwbacks is doing — redefining how society sees and uses reclaimed materials for everyday use — has never been done before. It's exciting to be a part of ongoing change.
At the end of the day, it's all about the materials. Now more than ever, we have to start thinking about the environment — it is a topic that a lot of designers and builders are paying closer attention to these days.
Kyle and I both feel that, in the next couple hundred years, we won't be building furniture from trees. So we are trying to start that movement now.