Exactly one week ago we had the grand opening party for Onetribe’s Adorn studio space, here in Richmond, VA. The turnout was wonderful (we had between 80 and 90 people through!) and everyone was incredibly supportive and very positive about our efforts. We have, for some time now, been slowly working on opening a retail showroom, antiquities museum and procedural space in the “clean” portion of our studio.
Our office in Richmond consists of 4,200s/f of space in an old 1930’s warehouse in the Manchester arts district. The majority of that (just shy of 3000s/f) is composed of Onetribe’s workshop, stock storage and order filling areas. The adjacent showroom space is about 1,000sf plus the 180s/f procedural room. The showroom space houses floor cases dedicated to Onetribe products, and wall cases dedicated to both Onetribe products, as well as the vendors that we retail for the piercing studio – Gorilla Glass, Quetzalli, Anatometal, Neometal and BVLA. The walls also house our two current Eastern and Western hemisphere antiques displays, showcasing 40-2000+ year old body jewerly from around the world.
We’ve posted pictures here and there of our studio before but I figured it might be neat to give a photo tour of our space so you can really get a feel for what we’re standing in every day while we’re making your jewelry or answering your emails.
Starting from outside, our place doesn’t look like much. Just a giant logo above our patio (great for cookouts/events!) and some bamboo growing along the side of the building.
Standing on the porch looking toward the door we’ve got our strawberry patch to the left and some potted bamboo growing out. If you stop by in late spring we’ve had beautiful and yummy organic strawberries for the past two years.
Walking in the door you get your first glimpse of what we do here. To the right we’ve got our workshop, followed by the order filling/stock areas and the showroom immediately at the other end of this space. The pathway is very wide with plenty of open space so that we can have events (art openings, project space, meetings for the non-profit, etc) and accommodate pretty much anything. If you look closely at the floor you’ll notice the remnants of the EPIC hopscotch course we had on the floor (from the entrance to the showroom) for the studio grand opening.
The workshop is the heart and soul of the goings-on at Onetribe. Mounted on the safety wall are three plaques which describe what each of the three workshop bays is used for. In order from the entrance forward, they are lapidary, metalsmithing and woodworking.
The lapidary bay contains an amalgamation of very old and new tools for grinding and carving stone and amber. Several various sorts of spinning diamond grit wheels, hand carving bits and tools, files and other assorted hard things for grinding. The shelves are lined with diamond coated saw blades, books and boxes of rough stone. Not in the photo are several pallets of boxes of rough stone in the area between the safety wall and the bay.
I personally spend most of my time in this bay, and if you’ve ever gotten a custom stone piece or cabochon from Onetribe, it was likely made by my hands somewhere within the confines of this photograph.
The next bay over is the metalsmithing bay, arguably the cleanest of the three because everything that happens here not only produces little to no dust but it NEEDS to be clean for doing enamel work, polishing and for the small kiln at the other end of the bay. If you’ve ever gotten anything with silver or gold from us, particularly bezel set pieces, this is where the bezel was made or finished and the stone was set, likely by our resident jeweler Sidney D.
Most of what happens here in the Richmond workshop on a daily basis is wood, and the man in charge of that is Marshall Brown. Marshall is in the wood bay daily lathe turning or hand working all of the woods on our site. Concaves, standard plugs, tunnels, Mayan flared pieces – most of these are made to order daily by Marshall. When we are particularly busy, I will take over the second lathe position and help clear out those orders. Tools in this bay are your standard woodworking varieties – two bench lathes, a bandsaw, belt sander, dust collection, hand carving tools, various chisels, blades, saws, sanding implements, finishing buffers, etc.
The next thing you’d pass walking toward the showroom is the customer service and jewelry stock storage area. If you send us an email or place an order, everything having to do with your inquiry or order generally happens in this area. In front of this area is our employee bike corral, and behind it is the employee lounge/break area.
The customer service area itself consists of several printers, our primary order filling/email machine, and LOTS of jewelry on all of those shelves. This is where we pull pre-made stock for our orders and pack boxes for shipment. Here Rachel and Cameron were working on doing inventory this morning because the post office is closed for July 4th and we’re unable to ship.
As you pass this you’d be close enough to the showroom door to undersand there’s something way different on the other side of that wall. Your first views would be of misc. retail (batik fabric, our t-shirts and tote bags, normal earrings, hair sticks and misc. things that we either make in house or purchase during our travels) and our studio administration area, where Rachel spends most of her time dealing with the administrative back end of the business. My wreck of desk space is also immediately to the right as you walk through the showroom door.
Continuing around the admin area you’d come across our conference area. This is a dedicated space for pulling out material samples and drawings and working one on one with people for custom orders. This allows customers to stop by and pick out unique materials and discuss the specific drawings and designs for their unique jewelry items. The walls are lined with mounted prints of previous custom projects for inspiration.
We’re now getting into the exciting part of the showroom. Rounding the corner and looking back toward the open space you get a good glimpse of all of the display cases, lounge and piercing procedural area.
Right now the showroom contains three 12s/f bamboo & glass floor displays organized into three categories: wood/bamboo, animal materials (horn, bone, antler), and stone/amber/precious metals. We decided this would be a very intuitive way to lay out natural products because we have a lot of customers that prefer not to wear animal materials, and this way they don’t even have to worry about browsing them alongside the jewelry that they can wear. The cases currently contain every Onetribe product, as well as a few favorites from our friend Ana of Quetzalli jewelry in Mexico City.
There are two kinds of cases on the bamboo display walls – product cases and museum cases. The product cases are 34″ square bamboo and glass displays featuring products from Onetribe (namely items that look nice backlit – translucent stones, amber, translucent horn), as well as precious metal items from Quetzalli, Titanium from Anatometal and Neometal, and glass from Gorilla Glass.
Adorn has the largest selection of the highest quality jewelry in the area. Quality over quantity – no steel, no acrylic, all procedural jewelry is ASTM certified implant grade or simply inert (glass). Everything we carry is what we believe to be the best in the world – we wear it daily and we trust our client safety to those companies, all of which we have personal relationships with.
We now have all of our antiques on display for visitors to view. The displays currently include two horizontal bamboo & glass cases featuring Eastern and Western hemisphere body jewerly from around the world. The Eastern collection currently features jewelry from Mainland and Southeast Asia and Oceania.
The Western case houses our greenstone, shell, obsidian and quartz items from the Maya, Aztec and other Mesoamerican cultures.
To accompany the collections we have compiled reference lists and a world map featuring numbered pins which corrollate the geographical location of the antiquies with the resource lists and the items themselves, which are numbered in the cases.
At the back end of the showroom we have our lounge and waiting area for the procedural room. It includes our library of anthropological and body modification related books and journal articles, as well as a television which we use for showing videos on various indigenous cultures.
Opposite that space is our piercing procedure room. We haven’t figured out what we’re going to put up on the ledge, either large scultures or lots of plants. The piercing room is just under 200s/f and is visually split with a structural column that separates the procedural from the sterilization area. The Virginia regulations for piercing procedural areas, jewelry and practices are, in our opinion, far too lax, and we’ve made every attempt to far exceed them so that we may serve as a model for future regulatory matters.
The box to the left is a UV air sterilization unit. We are a fully disposable, freehand shop so the room itself is quite sparse in terms of things sitting on counters and storage. To the right of this area is the sterilization room.
The room is spacious enough to allow for viewers if the client requests their presence, and we have always had in mind the idea of doing classes for the parents of teens and anyone else that wanted to attend, about what to look for when choosing a studio for tattooing or piercing procedures. The size allows us to pile quite a few people in for explanations on tools or sterile practices, but the shape of the room keeps it feeling cozy when it’s emptier.
We utilize a Statim 2000 cassette autoclave, which allows us to sterilize everything needed for one procedure and maintain a working sterile field without packing items into packages and doing a bunch of opening and shuffling around. There are a couple of items not shown in the setup, including our anodizer which allows us to anodize any of our Titanium to a specific color in house before the procedure.
That’s Onetribe! Thank you to everyone that has supported our efforts to bring this new studio, Onetribe Adorn, to fruition. This opens a new chapter in the story of Onetribe, now going on seven years of loyal service to the body modification industry and now proudly serving the needs of our current and future local customers. People should have a knowledgeable and safe place to learn about and receive procedures, and we saw a need for it in our area, so we’ve created what we believe to be the best thing we could to fill that need. A beautiful space where people can learn about and obtain beautiful jewelry items, receive unparalleled procedural service, and most importantly, a place where people can come and just be themselves.
