New Business Downtown Brings Steampunk to San Angelo

“Everybody’s got stuff like this,” says Belinda Poehls, motioning to an old metal chicken feeder, funnel and coffee grinder.

In the store she opened with her son, Justin, Poehls displays pulleys, pipes, gauges and fans—discarded remnants of days long past that have been re-purposed into unique, steampunk-style lighting fixtures.

Connected via various pipes and elbows, a funnel and a chicken feeder dangle upside down on long, adjustable cords attached to pulleys, each illuminated with vintage-style Edison light bulbs.

The pieces are one of a kind and made by hand, assembled from items the Poehls collect at trade shows and junkyards across the state.

“My son has always wanted to open a store,” Poehls said. “He’s at Tech. He started at Tech to work on an engineering degree and that’s why we started the business—he and I, together—to pay for his college. He’d already got a marketing degree at ASU.”

The store opened in April at 113 E. Concho, Suite 110, and in addition to the lighting fixtures, features a unique line of wall art dubbed “Hang Ups”. The painted mixed-media canvasses are covered in burlap and accented with 3D designs, carefully applied with a plaster-like substance, and coated in vibrant paint of all colors.

Each piece is a carefully-made family product, designed, created and assembled by Poehls, her son, her mother-in-law, her daughter and her sister, she said. The creativity behind the Hang Ups and the “1 of One” industrial lighting line Poehls lends to her son, Justin, who came up with an idea of how to use some of the products left over from Poehls’ wallpapering business some five years ago.

“I wallpapered for 25 years, and this product (burlap paper) is a wall treatment and I tried to market to everybody that was available—all the interior decorators and everybody—nobody wanted it,” Poehls explained. “I stood in the garage one day and said, ‘God, I know you gave me this for a reason. I’m just going to trust you,’ and then my son came home about week later from college and said, ‘I’ve got something cool we can do with your material’.”

After the initial run, Belinda Poehls and her son Justin began creating pieces and working trade shows, setting up permanent spots in Stanton and Canton where they sold their work. For three years the family regularly attended the shows before finally opening 1 of One early this year.

“When we moved in…it was all dressing rooms, and so we built all the walls and used all old pallets and stuff to give it some character. We’re really not in the furniture business,” she motions to some leather couches, “but we needed something to make it look homey.”

Carrying through the industrial design, the Poehls also sell various tables and stools, whose bases they’ve replaced with various gadgets harvested from the yards where they acquire parts for the lighting fixtures. Approximately 75 percent of the items for sale in the store are hand made, she said, and nothing can be 100 percent replicated.

“Some of the things, like if you buy an old funnel…that’s a piece that we may never find again,” she explained. “That’s what he (Justin) liked about it. You can duplicate things but no other piece will either be exactly the same again.”

Since opening, Poehls said traffic in the store has increased and they’ve started to see a demand for customized pieces. Inspired by the items in the store, people will bring in their own miscellaneous parts and request that Justin create a fixture or lamp using those pieces.

The Hang Ups are also customizable, she said, and can range from various designs to lettering, words, phrases and crosses. Popular items are the paintings whose images spread across two or three separate canvasses, she said.

While the business is best known through their Facebook page, sales have picked up in the physical store, which is open Thursday through Saturday. Poehls said a lot of the business is done on Saturdays, when out-of-town traffic is high and people have time to travel.

“We’ve had a lot of customers from Midland and Odessa,” she said. “It’s crazy up here how much out-of-town traffic and excited people [come through]. The downtown is just really thriving now.”

Although her son graduates in December, Poehls said he’s guaranteed her he’ll keep building fixtures for the store, even when he gets “a real job”.

“…he just like this kind of stuff,” she said. “He can’t be sitting long—15 minutes—and he’s already creating something else. We’ve been blessed by God most of all. God’s given us the talent and we’ve glorified him in it. It just comes.”