Master of Metal: Justin Hodges
Corbels are bracket-like architectural elements that stick out of a wall—sometimes to help support a weight above, like a balcony or the marble countertop of a kitchen island and sometimes purely for decoration. They were also the catalysts that helped propel Justin Hodges out of his family’s trucking company and into business for himself, harnessing his creative drive to produce custom metalwork through Urban Ironcraft and Legion Metals.
Hodges’ path began when he was newly enrolled at the University of Oklahoma to study business communications, but for him the spark wasn’t on campus; he was passing time over the summer by welding. His mother asked him to make a metal bed, which turned out well enough to impress a friend of hers, a decorator, who asked for a coffee table. Soon word spread among her friends. “And in my spare time, while going to OU, I’m starting to build furniture and I’m really starting to enjoy it,” Hodges remembers. “I had no idea I had an artistic side until I started messing around; I’d been working on oilfield equipment, which is not artistic at all. Next thing I know, I wake up and I’m building curtain rods and coffee tables all the time.”
On a trip to Laredo he was inspired by a chance discovery of a stockpile of incomplete furniture imported from Mexico. He imagined using it as raw material, and made a momentous decision: “I came home—I was 20—and I told my parents, ‘I want to open a furniture store.’ They thought I was crazy, but I’m one of those people [who] when I get my mind set on something, it’s going to be real hard to get me to back down.”
With a loan cosigned by his wary parents, his NorthPark Mall store was a go, and did well for its first couple of years … until 9/11 cratered the luxury furniture market. “I went from an average of 50 people a day coming in my store to five, and they weren’t buying anything,” he says ruefully. Hodges liquidated his inventory, managed to get out of his lease and shortly thereafter joined the family business, where he would stay for 13 years. And that was almost the end of his creative, entrepreneurial story.
But not quite. “I kept building furniture on the side. Not a whole lot, just as a hobby, ’cause I just love doing it. Then I found a little niche product line.” While his first home was under construction, Hodges whipped up some countertop support brackets, and the builder raved about their quality and unconventional construction out of metal rather than the standard wood. He was so enthusiastic that Hodges scouted online, was unable to find any similar product and decided to start an e-commerce store selling wrought iron corbels.
And the market responded. “I realized I need to keep going with these products, I’ve got something going here, some momentum,” he says. “So I stayed in the trucking business and I was doing this on the side. I ended up with five employees—as a side gig. I realized, ‘I’ve actually got a business here that I could jump into.’”
Actually, make that two businesses. Urban Ironcraft creates custom furnishings and residential/office items: coffee and conference tables, bookshelves, wine racks, fireplace screens, bathroom vanities and the like. Legion Metals, meanwhile, focuses more on site-specific architectural installations such as doors and windows, railings and bar backs. Why the division in name when the same expert crew handles it all? Hodges explains, “I didn’t want the website just to be, ‘We literally build everything under the sun.’ When someone comes to Urban Ironcraft, it’s because they’re looking for a specialty product and they found us on Pinterest or [elsewhere], and I didn’t want them seeing all the other stuff that we do for restaurants, bars, hotels, casinos and whatnot and getting confused.
When an architect finds us or a new general contractor that’s going to be working on a restaurant, we’ll point them to Legion Metals so they can see all the ultra-custom work that we do.” Case in point: “We’re working on this giant window right now, and it’s something we’ve never done before—we’ve built quite a few windows and metal doors for studies and offices and office buildings, but this one, the restaurant owner wanted it to pivot in the air above peoples’ heads. And this window will weigh a good 800 pounds. So for us to pull that off, and it be really safe and I can sleep at night, there’s a lot of R&D and engineering that went into that.”
Feats such as that also require a top-notch crew. “I’ve got an awesome team, and we’re highly specialized in what we do,” Hodges says, heaping special praise on designer and project manager Johnathan Hilton, whom he calls “like my right arm.” While Hodges can whip up a quick sketch, he admitted with a laugh that he still draws in MS Paint (“I’ve been doing it for 20 years, so I’m really good at it”), Hilton is the go-to guy for conveying a complex concept or knocking a client’s socks off with an animated or 3-D rendering. The company roster currently stands at 10 employees, and Hodges said their work has amassed enough buzz that they’re stretched fairly thin, and he hopes to add some quality personnel: “I would love to see us at 30 employees within two years.”
Success breeds success, but Hodges advises would-be entrepreneurs that sometimes the best course is to take it slowly. “I was very fortunate to be able to take the path that I was able to take, because I had a full-time career, 401k, I had a company truck, and I was able to start a business with $5,000 and ease my way into it debt-free for the first five years. Every dollar I made, I just turned around and put it right back in the business, so I was able to slowly grow this thing at my own pace as I wanted to, and I didn’t take on any debt until I jumped in full-time. It’s worked out, and the sky’s the limit in what we do, thank God. There’s a lot of potential to grow this thing, so I’m excited about the future.” And if that future growth needs any structural reinforcement, we know a guy who’s good with corbels.
photos by Kennon Bryce