Young Guns: Sam Young and Tyler Smith start experimental building supply company

Before they became good friends and business partners, Sam Young and Tyler Smith were always bumping into one another around Chattanooga.

It was as if fate was trying to push them together.

“I ran into this guy three times in one day,” says Young, gesturing to his business partner, Smith.

Young and Smith are co-owners of the city’s first boutique building supply store specializing in environmentally friendly products. The two have converted a former gas station into Green’s Eco Build & Design, a store stocked with paint, lumber, chalking, wood finishes and cabinetry.

It’s telling that the store doesn’t smell new. Unlike most remodeled buildings, it does not contain conventional construction materials that emit noxious fumes. That familiar “new house” smell, they explain, is actually not good for you – it’s called off-gasing and it’s one of the environmental hazards their products promise to avoid.

To use a wood-working term, the partnership between Young and Smith is a perfect dovetail. Smith is a building contractor with a green bent who owns the local design firm Antidote, and Young is an architect who previously worked at an environmentally friendly building supply store in Maryland.

Together, Young and Smith bring an array of craft skills and construction experience to a retail business that is admittedly trying to find its market. Not many construction contractors in Chattanooga are on the green wagon yet, but plenty of DIY remodelers are looking for earth-friendly products for their houses, the owners say.

Pregnant women are especially good customers, say Young and Smith, because they begin a journey looking for baby-safe nursery and crib paint and are subsequently introduced to more and more green products.

Much thought went into the branding of Green’s Eco Build & Design, which is located at 1510 Riverside Drive. The name “Green’s” is a nod to traditional family-owned hardware stores that used to dot every small town in America. (There’s nobody named Green actually involved in the ownership.)

The firm’s logo incorporates four icons that embody the store’s mission statement. The outline of a tulip poplar leaf (Tennessee’s state tree) reminds the owners to be good stewards; a hammer represents the local economy (the store is filled with locally sourced products); a paintbrush represents healthy materials; and a light bulb denotes bright ideas and energy efficiency.

Young and Smith are, in effect, trying to create a market for healthy building products the way other entrepreneurs have built networks of health-food stores. At the moment, it’s a market that’s underserved by big box hardware stores, they say.

“We believed in our hearts, if we built it they would come,” Young says.

Adds Smith, “We said to ourselves: ‘What if we provide quality products that are also green, and healthy and responsible?’ There are a lot of products like that.'”

Young says the commitment to local products and resources is one of the ways the company hopes to help the Chattanooga-area economy, and that money spent at Green’s goes twice as far locally as money spent at big box chains.

To walk around Green’s is to see examples of local synergies everywhere. There are backsplash tiles from a local company that splits salvaged granite countertop scraps, plastic paint buckets from a local plant that uses 90 percent recycled content, dog treats made from reconstituted food products and even tulip poplar samples to construct those new kitchen cabinets from indigenous wood.

The store specializes in Mythic house paint, an environmentally-friendly water-based brand. The store also has a buy-American flavor, boasting 95 percent domestic-made products.

There’s a soulfulness to the owners’ commitment to healthy materials.

“For us, the mark of success is advancing our ideas and values,” Young says. “We’re a niche: Quality, environmentally focused products.”