Alum pursues the ‘goods,’ the true and the beautiful

Home Features Alum pursues the ‘goods,’ the true and the beautiful
Alum pursues the ‘goods,’ the true and the beautiful
Evan Gage sells Persian rugs as part of his mission to foster mutual human understanding and respect via material goods.

“It was more or less through a fun, happy accident that I am now slinging Turkish rugs in the United States.”  

The American Dream—or at least an iteration of it which Evan Gage ’14 describes as “objectively quirky.”  

Gage Goods is a “social slash business experiment” which, vitalized by the aforementioned rug-slinging, grew out of Gage’s desire to foster mutual human understanding and respect via material goods.  

“Objects have a significance deeper than their immediate, physical qualities,” Gage says. “And I think connecting people to those things creates kind of a dense relationship with the thing.”

To clarify, Gage did not attend college with the intention of starting a business. Upon graduation, he was struck with a realization that so many of his thoughtful and competent friends felt far behind students at other institutions, who did not spend four years “reading Chaucer and doing the other very helpful things one does while living in a tundra.” 

 “It seems to me better to read Chaucer than to spend the only four years of your life you can dedicate to your intellectual development purely on, you know, worshipping at the idol of Mammon — or at least preparing to,” Gage says.

However, Gage’s sympathy for the ‘Tragic Hillsdale Graduate’ did not have an immediate outlet. Instead, he did “what many Hillsdale kids perceive as their only option”; he took a Fulbright English teaching assistantship in Turkey. From there, he taught at a classical school, and then went to graduate school.   

“I really liked those things. They were really incredible things. But I continued to have this thought that was like, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool to create some sort of a thing for people that didn’t fit into those niches in a way.’”

So naturally, he began Turkish rug-slinging. 

Long story short, Gage got lost in Antalya, Turkey. A group of English speakers found him and invited him to a dinner party.  Gage went to the party, “a rollicking good time,” and met some Americans who were staying in Turkey through the Fulbright Program, which they encouraged him to apply for.  

“At the end of the night, we all toasted to my returning to Turkey,” Gage says.  “On a certain level, I was just like, it can’t hurt. I’ll throw together an application and we’ll just kind of see what happens. And I got it.”

After graduating from Hillsdale in 2014, Gage lived in Tokat, Turkey.

“I was really moved by Turkish culture and people and fell in love with the cultural encounter there,” Gage says.  

Later, Gage went to graduate school at the University of Notre Dame to study Eastern Christian material culture.  He admits that this was “a cheeky way to be able to get back to Turkey.”  During the summer of 2018, Gage learned Turkish in Azerbaijan on a scholarship.

“In between my experiences in Turkey and Azerbaijan, I had been exposed to people who sold rugs and began to learn a bit about them,” Gage says.

Gage returned to America that fall with “quite a few rugs,” which he sold to friends. He later figured out that he could sell them on Craigslist for more profit.  

“I sold my entire inventory,” Gage says. “I was almost surprised—I didn’t intend to do a business thing, but accidentally found that there’s a way of doing it.”

Eventually Gage had to face the nightmare of incommensurability head-on and choose between applying for a PhD program and continuing to sell rugs.  He chose the latter.  

While on another scholarship in Turkey in the summer of 2019, Gage took the opportunity to travel the country and find rugs, along with several other recent Hillsdale graduates.  Upon returning in the fall, he founded the company Gage Goods.  

“As I was thinking about the name of the company, I realized I don’t want to just do rugs,” Gage says. “And at the end of day, it’s also perhaps a quiet nod to Larry Arnn,” Gage added. “The good that I hope I purvey is not ultimately a rug, but human community as life together.”

Luckily, Gage had “some notion of the human good” by the time he graduated.

“Everything about Hillsdale is why I’m doing the rug stuff now,” Gage says. “It’s because I took classes with Dr. Gamble and Dr. Birzer that I came to care very deeply for the stories of people unlike myself. Because I took classes with Dr. Jackson, I became capable of doing nuanced readings of pieces of art including, you know, material woven arts.”

Gage cites his Hillsdale friends as the reason that Gage Goods worked.   

“My really good friend Sally Nelson, who graduated in my year, is an incredible photographer,” Gage says.  “And she wanted my project to succeed.  She donated hours of her time to taking good photographs. That high quality of work she contributed to me from day one gave me this huge leg up, and I looked legitimate.” 

Many of Gage’s first sales were to friends from Hillsdale, and Gage Goods has thrived on that initial momentum.

So now what’s his move?

 

Gage’s big vision is to “provide a place for smart kids to do interesting, meaningful, and intellectually stimulating work.”

 

A TL;DR in Gage’s own words: “So I guess it’s like a rug company that just wants to save the world.  Or at least Hillsdale students.”