Meet Jennie and Davis White | Furniture Builders & Hurricane Hunters

We had the good fortune of connecting with Jennie and Davis White and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Jennie and Davis, how do you think about risk?
Risk plays a huge role in our lives and in our careers. It’s a valuable asset that we’ve been able to use to our advantage.

After both serving 5 years in the Air Force, we landed our dream jobs: flying through hurricanes for research with the Hurricane Hunters, so we packed up and moved to Houston!

During the hurricane off-season, we started our new furniture business, Samara Table Company LLC. We build and sell furniture when we’re not flying through the world’s most dangerous storms!

Calculated risks are a HUGE part of our lifestyle, but it wasn’t always that way!

Originally, we picked up woodworking as a hobby while stationed in North Dakota. We started building furniture in our tiny apartment with only 3 power tools. Our friends started asking us if we could build some for them, too! Before long, we were overwhelmed with orders and had a real business on our hands!

About that time, we also started a YouTube channel to document our business’ growth. After a couple of years building furniture and posting videos on YouTube, we had a nice little pair of businesses.

We took a risk by leaving our full-time jobs to start our businesses here in Houston…and we took a risk by hitting the upload button on YouTube 4 years ago!

However, had we never taken those risks and followed our fears, we wouldn’t have 2 businesses, the best YouTube audience in the world, and a very rewarding job in the Air Force.
What should our readers know about your business?
What drives us is helping others. Whether it’s building a kitchen table to share family memories, or flying through a hurricane to keep people informed, we want to help you cherish the ones you love by being together.

Samara Table Company LLC is a household goods company that provides high-quality, handmade products, which are best used where people gather together. Our goal is to decrease the effects of loneliness by promoting shared social experiences in the home.

Whether families celebrate around one of our handmade kitchen tables, or a group of friends share a snack on one of our charcuterie boards, we want to foster community.

We also have a passion for helping other businesses grow! We know first-hand how intimidating it can be to get clients in a big, new city. We do this by offering our personalized, handmade cutting and charcuterie boards as client gifts for lots of businesses!

Unlike common and perishable client gifts (like champagne, food, or gift baskets) our handmade boards get placed in the center of every client’s kitchen and stay there for decades – getting business owners countless word-of-mouth referrals!

We wanted to incorporate helping other businesses into our own business model because starting something new can be scary! We’ve had to overcome several challenges throughout our journey!

We get to do some pretty cool things now, but to be honest, we are remarkably average people. We just learned to follow our fears.

We adopted the phrase “Follow Your Fears” as our motto because over and over again we realized we had to do things that scared us in order to achieve our goals. We had to be comfortable being uncomfortable.

Neither of us had any business experience, so we had to teach ourselves how to sell, manage inventory, build workflows, and hire employees – all very scary things for a couple of weather nerds!

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
We love being outdoors, so our activities would definitely involve a lot of sunshine and fresh air!

First off, we’d head over to Pacific Coast Tacos on Washington Ave. If there’s one thing we love more than the outdoors, it’s a good taco! After an awesome lunch, we’d head up to Lake Conroe for an evening of fishing, camping, and s’mores.

After our camping excursion, we’d take them to see some of the city! We’d show them some of the amazing local shops and malls here in Houston. Then we’d take a coffee break at DUO coffee and pilates in River Oaks and introduce them to the owners, Marcus and Karman. To finish up the city portion of the trip, we’d check out the museum district the following day.

To end the trip, we’d spend an entire day down at Surfside Beach in Freeport playing football, surfing, and enjoying the sun!

The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
We’ve been blessed with many people along our journey who have supported us and given us the confidence to set big goals – even though they seemed really scary.

We’ve had several entrepreneurial friends in the Air Force, like Will Collette – an automobile and fashion model photographer. He taught us what it means to follow your fears. There are others who set amazing examples of what work-life balance should look like, and we’re extremely thankful for them! We’re also thankful for all the businesses here in Houston that have been using our handmade boards as client gifts since the beginning – like Deb Ambrosi, Broker/Owner of Ambrosi Realty in Katy! They really helped us get the business off the ground!

In addition to that, we’ve also gotten to meet some amazing people through our YouTube channel that have been watching us and cheering us on since we started our woodworking business journey 4 years ago! Their support builds us up, holds us accountable, and challenges us to be the best business owners we can be!

Website: https://www.samaratableco.com/

Instagram: @samaratableco

Facebook: Samara Table Co

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzTfxKT5Xv2TDXjGpGeB0tg