“Son, I don’t want you to take a job. I want you to create a job.”

I didn’t understand at the time how deeply those words would lodge in my mind. I didn’t know they would become a kind of programming, an assignment written into my spirit that I could not escape even when I desperately wanted to. Only later would I learn that the struggle to fulfill a divine assignment is never optional. It waits for you. It shapes you. It will either form you or break you, and sometimes it does both before it produces anything worthwhile.

Before Paul Rene existed, I was a young Black man from Detroit who fought his way into the world of car design. Ford Motor Company gave me my first lessons in shape language, proportion, and the rhythm of lines. But it also gave me an early taste of emptiness. I felt myself being trained to create objects that responded to markets, not meaning. Something inside me resisted.

So I walked away. And the fall came quickly.

And somewhere in that long wilderness, I began to understand that struggle is not a punishment but an appointment. No one, affluent or not, escapes it. 

Every affluent family, somewhere in its lineage, carries the story of a man or woman who endured the unknown, fought through fear, and pushed through the birth canal of circumstance to become the foundation for others. Struggle is an immutable principle. It is the price of consciousness, identity, purpose, and creation.

Worsening circumstances eventually led my worn-out wife and our newborn son to Phoenix, into the arms of Rene’s parents. They bailed us out on condition that I abandon my Dad’s mission and seek stable employment with benefits. I did so while secretly recruiting a crew of Mexican immigrants to create a shop with me.

I began to design the way life had shaped me through tension and release, through pressure and emergence, through unexpected angles and quiet harmonies. I discovered that wood holds memory. Metal holds conflict. Glass holds truth and exposure. And the human heart recognizes itself in all three.

My language of motion, curves that ascend, forms that lean forward, silhouettes that refuse to sit still, was not learned in school. It was learned through a 20-year process of becoming. Every setback sharpened my eye. Every humiliation refined my sensibilities. Every season of being broke in dollars but rich in faith taught me to see beauty where others saw limitation.

Phoenix became both my city and my metaphor. A place where heat purifies. A place where rebirth isn’t a concept, it’s a requirement. I didn’t rise because I was strong. I rose because there was no choice but to rise. Because purpose pulls a person upward with the same inevitability that gravity pulls downward.

Affluent homeowners, my clients now, often live in beautiful spaces yet still hunger for meaning. They, too, understand struggle, even if their current life seems polished and resolved. They understand the weight of legacy, the pressure to become, the quiet battles fought on the way to achievement. My work resonates with them because it carries the emotional truth that refined them as well.