Oyster Entrepreneur Finds Home in Maine: Brad Blymier

Lisa Belisle: Hello, I'm Dr. Lisa Belisle, and you are listening to Radio Maine. Today I have with me Brad Blymier, and he is the co-founder of War Shore Trading Company. Thanks for coming in today.

Brad Blymier: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Lisa Belisle: I'm really interested in your connection to Maine. I know this is not your initial place of origin, right. But somehow you felt drawn to be here.

Brad Blymier: Yeah, so I grew up in southern Pennsylvania right on the Mason Dixon line in a small town called Hanover, Pennsylvania. So if you've ever had Ts potato chips or Snyder's pretzels, that's my hometown. We're just a little bit west of Gettysburg, in between Gettysburg and York. But my connection to Maine is through my wife. My wife is a Mainer, true Mainer, born in Maine. She grew up in central Maine, Pittsfield. So that was our connection. We met out in northern California, and at the time I was living in Annapolis, Maryland. And she came back east, wanted to come back east. We started dating and then ended up getting married. We got married in Hallowell where her mother lives, right on the Kennebec River, a beautiful town.

And then we decided in 2018, after my father passed away, that we just wanted our kids to be closer to their grandparents. Hannah's mother's a wonderful person, and her dad, she has a great family up here. So we said, let's make the move. So in 2018, we moved up here, had a day to find a house. At that time we lived in northern Virginia, about 40 miles outside of DC. Our house sold immediately, so we were on the clock to find something. I remember, we drove our mother-in-law up. She drove up with Hannah and my two boys. I stayed down to finish out work, and then I flew up. It was a weekend of her high school reunion. She went to MCI. And we found an old friend of the family as a real estate agent, showed us seven houses, and at the end of the day we picked the last one in Portland. And then 21 days later, we were residents of Maine.

Lisa Belisle: That's a rapid turnaround.

Brad Blymier: It was really quick. We found a house, sold a house, bought a house, and moved to Maine in 21 days. And we've been here ever since.

Lisa Belisle: And it seems like it's worked out for you.

Brad Blymier: Yeah, it's been great. We knew that eventually we probably wanted to build. I had never been to Maine before I met my wife. I wanted to be closer to Portland. We're in the food business, we like to support restaurants, so obviously the restaurant scene in Portland's amazing. We found a house on Washington Extension, and then we wanted to get a feel for the area, because I didn't know the area at all, and see where our footprint was. It turned out that our boys got introduced to hockey at a very young age. So we found ourselves in Falmouth, North Yarmouth a lot, at the ice rinks.

So when it came time to start scouting for some land, that's the area that we looked at: Falmouth, Cumberland, North Yarmouth, Yarmouth. And it was hard to find land, believe it or not. You think Maine's a big state, and that land would be plentiful. But for the specifications we were looking for, something under five acres but over an acre, it was tough. But we finally found a little two acre plot in North Yarmouth. So we purchased that land, and then COVID hit, and that kind of put the brakes on everything, the insecurity of everything that was going on in the world. But during that time, we just kept working with an architect for a plan for a building.

And then once we came out of COVID, we decided to pull the trigger. We had a couple builders fall through for us, so we were very close to just putting it on the shelf for another year. But then the last builder we met with, we just clicked. MGM from Windham, Mike Manning, great group, and worked with their architecture design. He was a great guy, Matt. And we shared the same vision for the house we wanted. So we just started building. That was back in, well, June of 2022 we moved into the main house, and then we had a guest house built and a swimming pool, and that got finished in September. So we've been there. We love it. It's a great community. People have been, it's just nice. It's a nice area. I was telling your husband, this is the first time I've been on Cousins Island, and we live four miles away. So Maine's such a big state. There's a lot of little nooks and crannies everywhere to explore. So it's fun. Our kids love it.

Lisa Belisle: How old are your boys now?

Brad Blymier: My oldest, Jet, is nine, and my youngest, Jack, is eight. So they're pretty close. They're about 15 or 16 months apart, so they're one year apart in school. In hockey years, they go by birth year. So they're two years apart in hockey. But they're type A go-getters, very rambunctious. So we try to keep them involved in sports and activities pretty much 24/7 as much as we can.

Lisa Belisle: It sounds like your wife was pretty convincing to say, hey, we'd like to move to Maine. And you said, oh, sight unseen. Okay, sure. Let's do this. And 21 days later you were here.

Brad Blymier: Yeah, it had been a culmination of coming to visit. We would come up to visit twice a year. We'd come up for a week in the summer, and we'd always come up over the holidays. And it wasn't a hard sell for me. Unfortunately, my mother passed away many, many years ago. And I've had family in the area, but not our immediate area in northern Virginia. Most of my family was still in Pennsylvania. So when my dad passed away, it was kind of like, okay, my dad's passed away now, so what are we doing? What do we want to do? Family's important to me, in terms of grandparents. I only had one grandmother. And I just saw this as an opportunity. There's a good window here.

Our boys are still young. At the time I had a business partner, a guy I grew up with, and I just talked with him and said, hey, listen, it's gonna seem kind of out of left field. Not really, because he obviously knew that Hannah was from Maine, but we'd like to move to Maine. And a lot of people think it was a professional move, but it wasn't. It had nothing to do with our business. Our business was in DC. We own a high-end shellfish distribution company, so we service Maryland, DC and northern Virginia. Naturally people make the association with seafood in Maine, like, oh, did you move up there? Later, we took the opportunity to create something during COVID that allowed us to work and do some neat stuff here in Maine. We can talk about that later.

But the move was strictly personal. So my business partner was good. The nice thing is that Portland to Baltimore is an easy flight, and our facility was just 10 miles outside of BWI, and we lived literally three miles from Portland Jetport. So it's an hour 10 flight. So for the first year, after we moved, I think I spent about 161 days in DC. So I lived up here, but it still felt like, you know, when I was coming home for vacation. And then at the end of 2018, we were able to buy out my business partner. He had had a super successful cybersecurity business that he had sold. So when we started the company together, it was more my vision, well, it was both our visions, but it was more like, hey, Brad, we could make a thriving business out of this if you want to go full bore.

And he was very generous in allowing us to buy him out. And then I brought my wife on. I gave her a very short runway, Lisa, to get off the ground. But she's amazing. She's smart. She got it. And so since 2019, she and I are sole owners of the company. We work side by side every day. We stay in our lanes. I think a lot of people ask, is it hard to work with your spouse? And I would say, as a side note, it's harder to parent with your spouse than it is to run a business. But the reason it's successful, what makes it work, is we each have our specific duties.

I use the analogy of a Venn diagram where there's a small part in the center that we both work on together. But for the most part, she's back end, she's finance, she's HR, and I'm more sales, marketing, the face of the company, although she has a prettier face than me. But I stay out in front of it in sales and marketing, because that's my background, sales. And that's what I'm good at. So it's been good.

Lisa Belisle: So why seafood distribution? And what did you think that you were gonna be doing when you were younger? Was it seafood?

Brad Blymier: No. If you would've told me 15 years ago that I'd be owning my own business, I would've laughed, because it was never my ambition to be an entrepreneur or even a business owner. We just fell into it. My degree is in English, a minor in philosophy. So naturally I got into sales, right? So I graduated college, I went to school in Virginia. And my buddy Dave, who I just talked about, who was my business partner, he had graduated a little bit before me and got this job in Baltimore, just selling local area networking. He knew me from college, and just to try to lay some kind of roots, kind of feel it out, I took that job. And I immediately realized that I liked sales, I liked all aspects of it. I'm not a math guy. My wife's that right brain. She went to RPI for engineering, started there. So she's math. But I like talking with people, and I like the art of the deal and negotiation, and I like taking a product and convincing somebody that it's something that would enhance their business or their life. So that was a great jumping off point for me. I was 20-some, inside sales, all of us sat inside of a bullpen, and just hammered the phones and created customers.

So I knew immediately there that probably the trajectory of my career was gonna be in sales or sales related. And it was. So I worked there and then I ended up getting into a software, believe it or not, AI artificial intelligence software program in the academic world that actually would evaluate students' writing. It's funny now because AI's really coming to the forefront. So this was probably back in the early two thousands. And that gave me an opportunity to move out to California. So I moved out to Los Angeles, and I managed some territories in San Francisco and LA. I lived out there for nine years, and came back with that same job. And when I came back, I reconnected with my childhood friend Dave. We'd always been in contact, but we were in the same geographical location now.

And he said, hey, listen, my dad bought this property in the lower Eastern Shore, Virginia. His dad, Charlie Seve, great guy, was a big outdoorsman, and he bought this property on the Pungoteague Creek in Chesapeake Bay, just to duck hunt. And he would go down there a couple times a year, and this was back in like 2009. So the aquaculture boom hadn't taken off yet, but it was starting to be something and to be very visible. So we were lucky enough to get in the front end of that. And he said, hey, let's start an oyster farm. I'm like, all right, yeah, let's do it. Now I'd grown up close enough to the Chesapeake Bay where we'd been down there.

Dave used to run a crab truck from our hometown Hanover down there to the bay. So he was very familiar with it. And he cut some fish in a seafood company when he was in college. So we had a little familiarity with it, but we just basically found an established oyster company, called him up, asked if we could come down and see what they're doing, how it's done, buy equipment from them. So that's what we did. And we leased a couple acres at the bottom of the Pungoteague Creek in Onancock, Virginia. And we started growing oysters. At first I still had my full-time job. He had his full-time job. And the weekends we'd wake up at four thirty and drive all the way down.

Think about the Chesapeake Bay, it's a haul. You've gotta go over the Bay Bridge, and then down the Eastern Shore. So it's not easily accessible, like up here in Maine, where people live on the Damariscotta, or people live on the Royal River. It's very easy to get their leases. We had to travel quite a distance, three, three and a half hours to get there. But we'd go down and do it, and we put, I don't know, maybe a hundred thousand oysters in the water. And then finally we had this product and we're like, wow. So we have now what? And we're like, well, we should try to sell it, right? And so, yeah, let's do it. So there was a local restaurant at the time.

Dave was living in Old Town, Alexandria, right outside of DC. It was called Hank's Oyster Bar. And we went in, and we were friendly with them because we were patrons there of the restaurant. And we just approached the general manager and chef and said, hey, we just started an oyster farm. We've got two bags of oysters here. Would you be interested in buying them? And they said yes. So we're like, all right, let's do it. So shortly thereafter, Dave said, hey, listen, let's take a stab at putting a business plan together. Let me do a pro forma and take a look at this. And as we tell the story, we actually created the business plan in that very same restaurant, sipping whiskey at the bar.

And pretty soon he said, hey, if you want to take a stab at this, we could try to make a business. Now we realized, Lisa, that there were two sides of the business. There's farming and there's distribution. And we didn't necessarily want to be in the farming side, because we weren't in the position to move down to the Eastern Shore. Again, it's not like living off the Damariscotta or the Royal over here. Out there, it's pretty sparse down there. There's not a lot of action, unless you love the outdoors. So we thought, well, let's go the distribution route. Let's keep our farm, let's keep our flagship product, the War Shore oyster, and let's try to market that.

So we drew up the business plan, and then I just literally started, I would take a cooler and I'd have oyster samples, and I would literally just drive down to DC and I would knock on the back doors of every restaurant I could and try to talk to the chef. And that's how we built the business, one restaurant at a time. So pretty soon, once we started bringing our oyster to the chefs, naturally they're like, well, is there anything else you could bring us, any other oysters? So then we just thought, okay, we're gonna need more than just our one oyster. So we developed another oyster, a brinier, saltier oyster off of Tilghman Island. So now we had two oysters with different flavor profiles, and then we just said, hey, I want to bring other farms' oysters.

So we really got into distribution, and then we started picking up other oysters, and then we moved outside our region up into the northeast, and then we moved up here to New England, and then we started bringing in Canadian oysters. And then we were flying in West Coast oysters, and just kind of built from there. And then we started adding scallops, and lobster meat, clams. So that's how we got started. I'm sorry, it's a long answer to your question, but that's the backstory. So really it was about the opportunity of being able to start that oyster farm and then having the window. I was speaking about Kevin earlier about what I think, in life, what's worked for me, is life's about timing, opportunity and execution.

So the opportunity was there, the timing was right, and all we had to do is execute on it. And that's what we did. And I give tons of credit to my wife, Hannah, because when I met her, I told her, hey, we just started this oyster farm, pretty much what I had in savings went into starting this farm. I don't have anything now, but I think this could be something. So she really invested in me when I had nothing, to tell you the truth, and she's been an integral part. Even when she wasn't officially working, she would come with me down to the farms. She would fly in from northern California and spend the weekend in a truck with me driving down to an oyster farm, and that's what she did for a long time. So it just was really neat when we had the opportunity to bring her on board full-time and make her a partner of mine. It just seemed like a natural progression. And it's been great. So that's how I got into it. It was just opportunity. My friend's dad was a duck hunter, had this property, and boom. And that's how I went from software sales to where we are today.

Lisa Belisle: You seem really passionate about the oysters in particular.

Brad Blymier: Yeah. It's interesting. And I'll tell you a story that's funny because, you know, you go out into your social life, when you go to parties, you're always exchanging innocuous banter with people. Where are you from? What do you do? So I tell people, yeah, I'm in software sales, and there's no follow-up questions. That would be it. Right? Great. But the minute I started telling people that I grew oysters, it was funny. People were intrigued, and just wanted to know every aspect about it. I don't know if it's something about the oyster itself, or just something that is produced by Mother Nature and not artificially in a factory or something.

But I found that people had a really big interest in aquaculture. Because again, back in 2009, 2010, it was just starting to become prevalent. And even today in Maine, if you looked at the number of oyster farms in Maine, probably in 2010 as compared to today, I think there's well over 130, 140 now. So people are identifying the opportunity there. And plus, if you think about the product itself, oysters are great. They're filter feeders, so they're one step above sustainable for the environment. They're actually restorative. So oysters clean the water. And before, with the natural wild oysters, they used to be plentiful, these stories of Captain John Smith.

Boats would get stuck in oyster reefs, natural oyster reefs, when he's coming into the Chesapeake. That's changed now, with civilization, right? So the more you're building, the more you're putting hard surfaces down. You've got a lot of runoff coming into your tributaries that lead into your major bodies of water. So it's disruptive for natural oysters to find footing on reefs and grow. So when aquaculture came along for the ideal farmed oysters, it was great, because now you're putting a product back in that's going to replenish the water that you're in, and filter it. So I always tell people, you're doing a good thing when you're eating oysters. You're really helping the environment.

And the states back then, Virginia was one of the first to understand that, and they gave tax breaks, and they made it really approachable to be able to lease the land. We were able to lease four or five acres fairly inexpensively to be able to do this. And then now, fast forward to today, 2023, the oyster population has boomed, and there's tons and tons of oysters across the country and in Canada. And it's a great product. I'd like to say, hey, we chose the oyster because of saving the environment. But it was happenstance. I'd be lying if I said that we chose the oyster because we wanted to save the environment.

Now it just so happened that that was the opportunity we had, and this was a fringe benefit. And it's neat and people like it. People like to talk about oysters. Oysters are social. You go out, who doesn't like oysters? Well, actually my wife doesn't, which is a good thing. But yeah. So it's exciting to talk about oysters and the environment, because there's so many different facets of it, right? And there's so many different ancillary things that contribute to oysters. You can talk about a lot of things, starting with the oyster, which leads into other conversations about anything with aquaculture or the environment. And obviously here in Maine where we're surrounded by water, it's been lobster, lobster, lobster. I think oysters are starting to get up in that conversation as well.

Lisa Belisle: It seems like, as you're describing timing, that the intersection between the work that you do and Portland, and really the booming restaurant scene, probably would've created a very nice synchronicity. I would think, because for example, Eventide really received national recognition, and from very early on, and everybody was there, lines outside their door, right? And they really did focus on the oyster. So here you come along and you already have your product, and you're from a different part of the country, but you're kind of bringing yourself to Maine, and it seems like that kind of worked out well.

Brad Blymier: Yeah, no, like I said, it was easy. So Andrew, small world, Andrew coaches Little League, so last summer he coached my son in summer ball. And quick story about him, if we have time. It just talks about how close knit a community this is. So I see him and I'm like, this guy looks really familiar to me. And I see he has a shirt on with oysters, and I said, man, how do I know this guy? And unbeknownst to me, he was thinking the same thing when he saw me, and finally he came up and approached me at a game and said, hey, do you work for War Shore? And I'm like, yeah, I'm the owner, Brad. And I'm like, man, you look really familiar. He's like, yeah, I'm Andrew. And I'm like, Eventide. So the funniest thing is I was trying to close a big client in Baltimore with a lobster program. So we deal with Ready Brothers Seafood, they're in SoCo, and they've got a live production plant in Portland. So I flew down with two of their employees and did this presentation, and they had this video selling this product. It was cold-cracked, raw lobster. And that video we showed our clients, and it spotlighted a Portland restaurant. So it was even tied, and it was Andrew, and that's where I remember his face. And then I joked, I'm like, you helped me close a million dollar deal, you didn't even know it.

So that was a funny story, the first time I met Andrew. But yes, to answer your question, that's a good time probably to talk about the Maine Oyster Initiative. So when we moved up here, like I was saying earlier, it was a purely personal move. I wasn't looking to do business in Maine, or disrupt any of that. But when COVID came around, I know a lot of people got creative, and without going down that rabbit trail of what COVID did and how everybody shifted, we had an opportunity to get the PPP loan from the government, and we created, which many people did, kind of a Blue Apron sort of concept, where we would take seafood and then we would ship it out directly to people in the home.

So originally we first started doing it where we'd use our own distribution trucks, and we would pack all the seafood in boxes, and then have our drivers deliver straight to people's homes. So if you were a customer and you went to Hank's to get their product, now we would bring that seafood straight to you, to your home. We called that Current Catch, and it was great. It gave us purpose during COVID. And it gave us an opportunity to truly use the PPP program in the real spirit of what the legislation was, to keep our employees employed and to keep going. So we did that. Once wholesale came back, that was our true model. So we phased that out, because that's a whole different ball game, that mailing to consumer.

It's really all about putting dollars in the marketing, search engine optimization, all that stuff. And that wasn't our cup of tea. We wanted to focus on the wholesale, it was our business. But what it did, Lisa, it allowed us to create a space that we could do this. So we actually rented space from Scales. So Dana had some room right next to Upstream. So Upstream's is the local river there, and he was actually gonna do, I think like a seafood shop there. But it was really just vacant space. So at the time, George Parr, RIP, George Parr, he was kind of like a local fishmonger that everybody knew. I was talking to him about places, and he said, well, why don't you guys just come in here? We're not using the space. So we set up shop there. It was great, and we'd get all our fish right next door from those guys. So it was a nice situation. But when that went away, we had that space and I was like, I want to still do something with Maine. And I had a vision several years ago about taking Maine oysters and getting them across the country, not only to distributors like me, but other distributors. So that's when Hannah and I started the Maine Oyster Initiative. And basically the Maine Oyster Initiative is us working with a few select farms, taking their product and brokering it across the country to other distributors like me. And that's what we did.

So COVID opened the door for Current Catch, Current Catch opened the door for us to get into the Maine Oyster Initiative. And that's how I got involved now in Maine, to circle back around to what you're saying. So our mission is that we want to take Maine seafood and represent it outside the state boundary. Which is really neat. So that we're putting true, authentic dollars back into Maine aquaculture, that aren't recycled dollars in Maine. These are product that's going out, going to other states in the country specifically. So we actually don't do business in Maine. We had an agreement with Upstream that, hey, I'm not coming up here to look for distribution. It's a crowded market.

These guys were great. A lot of farms would go direct. We didn't, that wasn't our MO up here. Our MO was to procure the best seafood and take it outside. So today the Maine Oyster Initiative, we've recently moved down to the Portland Fish Exchange, and I run it two days a week. And I work with two great farmers, one in Damariscotta, one right here in the Royal River, Butterfield Shellfish. Keith Butterfield does a great job. He's got his lease right between Little and Big Moshier Island. And they harvest oysters and they bring them to me in the Portland Fish Exchange, and I get them across the country. So we get them down to Alabama, Florida, Boston, they're out to Texas, Pennsylvania.

So it's fun. It's neat to be able to take Maine's product. And we do this with lobster as well. So our three biggest products in our company, our portfolio, are oysters, lobster meat and scallops. And so we sell about a million Maine oysters a year outside the state of Maine. As a whole company we do about five to 5.5 million oysters. So a good percentage of those are Maine oysters. So yeah, it worked out great. And just to meet Dana Street, and then to meet Andrew, you meet people that are pretty big players. And it's just neat. Again, it's a nice community. I talked about the hockey community, for us that was big, getting us into North Yarmouth. And the restaurant community is nice too. We don't know a ton of people, but the ones that we've met, like Andrew and Dana, it's nice. You feel that support and everybody's for everybody else. They want everybody to succeed. And for me, not being a quote unquote true Mainer, I ride off the coattails of my wife to kind of get that street cred.

Lisa Belisle: It's my understanding that you actually have to have about three or four generations back in order to consider yourself a true Mainer. I thought you actually just had to be born here, right? But that is not, from what I'm told. Especially in the central Maine area, because I work up there in the medical field. And when you have people coming in, they're like, oh, no, that family's only been here a generation or two. You have to go back even further than that.

Brad Blymier: Yeah. So I would think, my wife's mother's family are McGowans. And so they've got several generations back. Her grandfather, Barney Bebe, used to work at the state. Her grandmother, who just recently passed away, was editor for the Skowhegan newspaper. My mother-in-law, Jennifer, just retired from the state, she worked at the state. So yeah, I think she probably qualifies now. It's funny because her father worked for Cianbro, another big construction company, growing up, and he traveled a lot. He was with bridge construction. And Hannah tells the story that her younger sister, Heidi, was actually born in New York while they were down there just for a brief period of time. And according to some purists, she's not a true Mainer.

But Hannah is. Hannah was born there. She was actually born in a barn, believe it or not, by choice. I don't know the complete backstory. I know that her grandmother covered it in the local newspaper, because we have a really cool newspaper clipping about the story. I think her mother's doctor for some reason had something set up in a barn. I don't know. I know it was planned. It wasn't like an emergency. But anyway, we talk a lot about the many generations of going back. And again, that same motif, right, of family, and pride. I find that that's neat. It's neat that families have stories and they stick together. And I wanted my kids to experience that. I still try to take them back to Pennsylvania, because I don't want them not to feel my roots. And I've got family back there and good friends. So it's important, I think, to expose your children to that, at least for me anyway.

Lisa Belisle: One of the things that I hear about often for people who decide that they want to go in business for themselves is that they actually have connections to other people who have developed creative ways to live their lives. And you happen to be connected to Jill McGowan, who is a very well-known, nationally and probably internationally well-known designer, right, who's in the apparel field. So do you think that that helps build, again, this idea that, okay, we can design this ourselves, we can figure this out ourselves, we can sell this ourselves. Do you think that that helps that for you?

Brad Blymier: First of all, Aunt Jill's amazing. She's great. She lives in Falmouth. We see her very often. She's actually involved in our boys' lives. She takes her little interest. Her son Theo was a hockey player, like our boys. He's older, he's in college now, and he's just been a really good influence on my boys. My boys really look up to him. I employed Theo a couple summers to work with me in the Maine Oyster Initiative. So I've got a chance to know Theo pretty well. We share the same birthday. So yeah, Jill's great, and her brand up here is great. And we talk about business. I think it's more a testament to just that spirit of the McGowans, they're all hard workers.

And I think my wife certainly has gotten that. My wife's probably the hardest worker I know. They're givers, like they like to serve. My wife gives a lot of her time. She sits on the board of the Casco Bay Hockey Association. She's a team assistant for a couple of the teams, so we spend a lot of time doing that. And that's her mother and her whole family, they share that same spirit. But in terms of, yeah, I think that just comes through. I think there's a certain spirit that you have, because owning a business isn't easy. The highs are pretty high, high risk, high reward. But at the end of the day, you're responsible for everything.

When I was in software sales, right, I had a territory, California, here you go, Brad, hit your number. I would do it. And that was it. But when you're in a business, every aspect of that business comes back to you. So it's neat to be able to talk with business owners like Jill or Andrew Taylor or Dana Street about just owning a business, and all the things that are involved with owning a business. And other friends, I've got a friend who was a former president of Sebago Shoes, his son and my son play hockey together. And we talk a lot about just business, and managing people and resources and stuff like that.

So yeah, like I said earlier, I never set out to own my own business, but it was an opportunity. And there were some lean years. We didn't get successful overnight. And again, this is a big nod to my wife, Hannah. I remember she was pregnant with our first son, Jet, and we were trying to break into the Whole Foods market in the Mid-Atlantic, and they gave me three stores in DC and they said, if you want more stores, you need to come out and demo. So obviously, when you go to Whole Foods, you always see those demo stands. So for a better part of that year, every weekend I was in a different Whole Foods over the weekend while my wife was pregnant, shucking oysters. And the Mid-Atlantic region for Whole Foods went all the way to Pittsburgh and all the way down to Kentucky. So that's a sacrifice you make, and it's one that pays off, because now we sell oysters in over 110 Whole Foods in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast. So it's just that kind of stuff that you build upon.

Lisa Belisle: Yeah. I mean, it is incredibly hard work to own a business. And I think, you've mentioned my husband Kevin a few times, right, who owns the Portland Art Gallery, but he also is behind the camera here. He does all of the taping and the producing of this show. He and I work together very closely like you and Hannah do. And a lot of our conversations are around, how do we reach people more effectively? How do we build community within the art world? And it becomes a regular, ongoing conversation at almost every single dinner table and when we're out socializing. And I actually think, if you have the right attitude, it can really be very beneficial for a relationship. But it's also a choice. It's a choice that you make to continue to really work through what can be challenging at times.

Brad Blymier: No, absolutely. It's no small feat owning a business together and raising two children. And COVID was the perfect example. I mean, COVID really, you're not gonna believe this, Lisa, but my hair used to be as dark as your sweater. And COVID could put an end to that pretty quickly. But you make a great point. But look, look what that's done for you. I'm sitting here today because of your efforts to do something different, to put these interviews up on your website. That's how I learned about the artist that I purchased art from, in your gallery. I went online and I saw the interview with Bibby, and I'm not even gonna try to pronounce her last name. Gignilliat. Yeah. And it's funny, because going back to Jill McGowan, the reason I even walked into her gallery is we were in downtown and Hannah was, I think, meeting with her trainer and I had a little bit of time to kill. She's like, meet me at Jill's store, because she always likes to go in and browse. So I went to Jill's store and was looking around. And I still had some time to kill, so I just walked down, because I was looking for, let me see if I can find some more galleries. And I saw Kevin's gallery and I walked in, and met Emma, who was very kind. And I kind of had just a t-shirt on.

My hat was on backwards, and I was walking around, and I came around the corner and I saw Bibby's work and I was, I'm like, wow, we need some of this art on our wall. Because we just built a house and we were trying to really make it ours and do some stuff special with it. So I said, I walked back up. I saw the pieces I liked, two pieces I liked, and I walked back up and got Hannah and convinced her to come down. And we walked in, and she saw them, and then she saw a third one, and then probably within 10 minutes, she was like, drop this off today on my way home from work. And that's how we were introduced to the Portland Art Gallery.

Which is great. I mean, talking about our kids and our influence on them. I recently turned 50, and I think when I turned 50, you start thinking, you're on the back nine of your life now, and you start thinking about your legacy and what's important to you, because more than half of your life is over. And one of the things I always thought was needed was, what do we want to leave to our kids, outside of just money. And the first thing I thought of was, well, when I turned 50, it was our 10th year anniversary of my wife and I. And so we went to the jewelry store where we purchased her ring. And she's like, you're 50 now. How about a nice watch? And I never really thought about it, but I'm like, yeah, but I was thinking heirloom as well. And so that kept me thinking, what are some really neat pieces that we can have that we can pass down through the generations? And then the natural progression of the watches was, well, how about artwork? And we had purchased a piece of art from an artist in Ogunquit. And that kind of got us going on it. So we saw this stuff and we're like, let's really invest in some nice art that we can pass down to our boys and they can pass down. So that's how I got introduced to Emma obviously.

And then Kevin asked, hey, would you be willing to come and talk about it? So we're complete neophytes in the art world, but it's neat. You don't realize it's like a portal into a whole different world. And it's one of those things, it's like, you don't realize how many white cars are on the road until you have a white car. I didn't realize how many galleries are out there until I started buying some art. So it's been neat. And it's been a good thing just to dip our toes into. And now we always look for stuff, because we want to make our home, we built our dream home, and we built it with the ideal of comfort and community.

And we want our art to reflect who we are. So it was neat. And I didn't want to just, no offense against Maine, but there's only so many lobsters, I didn't want to just douse our whole house in Maine stuff. So it was neat that we saw this. And this was actually a California artist who lived close to where my wife spent time in Sonoma, Sonoma County. So we had a connection there with her living there. My wife lived in Healdsburg, California, when I met her. So it was neat to have the purchased art in Maine from a California artist. So I think we'll continue down that path just to look for some neat stuff, and look for people from across the country to buy from and then support.

Lisa Belisle: Well, I'm very glad that you watched the initial interview with Bibby and got connected with Bibby. And maybe when she's back out here again for one of her shows, you'll actually get a chance to meet her.

Brad Blymier: Yeah, I would love to come and meet her, and show her where her art resides in our house. It's fun, because it's something that you look at every day. When we were building our house, it's weird, until you build a home, you don't realize all the little nuances and things, like light fixtures and just placement of lights and stuff like that. So we've learned a lot and it gives you an appreciation of everything that exists. And I think life's about those small things. A lot of times we look forward to bigger events, but what do you see when you wake up? What's the first thing you're looking at? How do you feel? How's your environment make you feel about that day? So it's neat to create an environment that you want to be in. We built this nice swimming pool with the whole idea, and a guest house, for community, to have our boys' friends over, hockey teams, soccer teams, baseball teams, our friends and family, entertain, and we've done that. It's great. Almost too much, to the fact that I laugh because my wife, she likes to be involved, she's social and she's great, and she makes great connections and likes to be out and be social. And at one point she came to me and she's like, you know, we haven't left this house in seven days. And I was like, yeah, that's great, isn't it? And she's like, no, we need to. Because for me, I built an environment that I just want to be in and share with people. So art is definitely a part of that, because they're conversation pieces. It just adds to the whole big picture of living. And I've seen it here on your property, same thing. You guys created a wonderful property that I'm sure that you feel comfortable with. And it's awesome.

Lisa Belisle: Well, those are great words to end on. I've really enjoyed our conversation today.

Brad Blymier: Yeah, I did too. Thank you.

Lisa Belisle: I've been speaking today with Brad Blymier, who is the co-founder, along with his wife Hannah, of War Shore Trading Company. And I'm assuming that if you wanted to learn more about War Shore, you could probably find them on the web.

Brad Blymier: Yeah. Warshore.com.

Lisa Belisle: And I hope that you'll be able to, maybe Brad will come to one of our openings, and maybe also Bibby will, and we can all continue to build this great community. I'm Dr. Lisa Belisle, and you've been listening to Radio Maine. Thank you.

Brad Blymier: Thank you.