Lichen Is Not Just A Furniture Store
The duo behind New York's coolest design incubator and studio wants you to know they do more than sell home goods.
By Evan Shinn
Photography by David Spector
Published
Ed Be and Jared Blake want to solve your apartment design woes with Lichen. Since 2017, the duo’s efforts to make designer furniture – both contemporary and vintage — affordable has landed its store on an impressive roster of best-of lists, but the project has always been more than its Ridgewood showroom of Noguchi, Eames and Mies. I chatted with the co-founders about their working relationship, Lichen’s community approach to design, and designing for your own wants and needs.
Evan Shinn: How did you two meet?
Ed Be: We met on Craigslist. Both Jared and I were selling furniture independently of each other while doing our side jobs in 2017. He was selling an Eames shell chair, and I was buying to stock and hold for a brick and mortar, which was kind of a pipe dream at that moment in time — everything was piled into my apartment — so when I came to pick up the chair from Jared, he was like, “Oh, what are you doing with it?” I was like, “Oh, I'm probably gonna sell it, honestly.”
He's like, “Wow, that's kind of something similar to what I'm doing.” So, we kind of just hit it off at that kind of weird moment, which is unusual for a Craigslist transaction. It's usually just, “let me get my shit, and I'm out of here.” But he was kind of curious and kept on asking more questions, and all of those questions led to coffee to talk about what we were actually doing with the furniture. While we were chatting, we came to the same conclusion that we were doing the same thing, just differently.
Jared was doing it digitally through a platform that he was trying to create on his own through Instagram. And like I said, I was collecting to start a brick and mortar. And so you kind of combine those two prowesses into Lichen. And after that first initial coffee meeting, we started a storage unit together a month later.