Both parents of Bobby Wisdom’s mother and grandmother were weavers, so he learned to weave at an early age. Then in 1978, Bobby and his partner, Warren Walker, decided to open Dreamweavers in Eureka Springs.
“Warren was working for the state with special needs children in Jonesboro,” Wisdom said. “He got a new boss who didn’t like gay people and was pretty rude. So, we decided we were just going to work for ourselves. We moved to Eureka to do that and set up our weaving studio. Eureka accepted us for who we are right away. We were doing off loom weavings, like wall hangings. We figured out pretty quick we weren’t going to get rich doing that.”
They moved the business that was next door to the Palace Bath House into a school bus, and did art shows up and down the East Coast for a couple of years, then met a man who ran a company that bought scraps from factories around Atlanta, bailed it, and shipped it overseas.
“We convinced him to sell us some scraps, waste from sock making called loopers,” Wisdom said. “We realized those could be woven into small bath rugs. We invented the looper rug in 1979. The first gift show we did was in Atlanta. We sold out in about a day.”
Back in the early days of their business, they didn’t refer to products as recycled because at the period of time, recycling wasn’t considered hip. And technically, what they were doing wasn’t recycling, but upcycling.
“The word ‘upcycled’ was only invented in 1996 and we had been doing it for a while,” Wisdom said. “We built our wholesale business and did gift shows all across the country. We settled in Little Rock because there was an airport, and Northwest Arkansas didn’t really have one at the time. We bought four little historic buildings linked together in downtown Little Rock and started our first factory. We had twelve weavers, and supplied furniture and home decor.”
A few years into that, the man they were buying the scrap from sold the company and it was moved to Thailand. There was not another supplier like that in the country, which left Dreamweavers with a major dilemma. So, they bought tickets to Thailand, found where the scraps had ended up, and found a woman using them to weave placemats and napkins to sell at large department stores. They tried to convince her to weave rugs for Dreamweavers, but she wasn’t interested.
“Two weeks later we got a fax from her that the cost of cotton in Thailand had doubled overnight, so she was out of business,” Wisdom said. “So, she decided to make rugs for us. We started out with twelve weavers from a tribe where they believe a woman is not fit to marry if she can’t weave. The weavers came down and applied for jobs. They were incredible weavers. Before we knew it, the whole tribe moved down and built a village around us. We got up to four hundred weavers.”
They starting showing their work in Paris and South America, and had the satisfaction of helping a lot of families who were really poor.
“They fought to work for us because we were good employers,” Wisdom said. “Then President George Bush decided to drop all of the textile quotas for China, which we had had for years. Because of that, every company we were buying scrap from moved to China. So, we were out of business again. We had to lay off all 400 weavers. China was the only place with scrap, so we opened two factories there.”
The couple moved to Little Rock in 1982, and have had a factory and warehouse there since that time. While there, they hired a Hmong weaver from Laos, Michael Nehm, a young man who had managed to survive the killing fields.
“He is an amazing person who had been through absolute hell,” Wisdom said. “At age nine, he lived in a tree with other boys to avoid being drafted as a soldier. They would sneak into camp at night and steal food to stay alive. For two years they lived on bananas.”
Nehm immigrated to the U.S. after the Vietnam War, and found not just employers, but parents.
“He adopted us because his parents aren’t anywhere,” Wisdom said. “He Americanized immediately. He picked up the language quickly. Can you imagine having to send a nine-year-old to a foreign country to save his life? His older brother had light skin, and was shot by the Khmer Rouge. Michael saw horrible things. He has been through hell yet is the most well-adjusted person I know.”
Nehm lived with his brother and sister-in-law in Little Rock before moving in with Wisdom and Walker, working as their cook for 30 years. Nehm married a Cambodian woman, Synuon, and the couple now have a seven-year-old son.
“We opened the retail shop in Eureka for our son and daughter-in-law,” Wisdom said. “We have two houses in Little Rock up for sale and are in the process of moving our warehouse to Eureka Springs. We want to get back to the neighborhood.”
The bulk of their business is still wholesale, and they sell rugs, pillowcases, ottoman covers and pillow chairs at their Spring Street store for wholesale. They still have two factories in China because that is the only place in the world with the scrap fabric they need. A lot of their products are made from Teddy Bear fabric.
“There is a huge city in China that makes ninety-five percent of the teddy bears in the world,” Wisdom said. “We buy a lot of scrap and fiber from them.”
At one point they were making rugs, belts and other items from used neckties. Businesses that donated clothing to foreign countries was paid by the U.S. government, and the bundles of clothing would include neckties. But neckties were useless in Cambodia, a country where men wear sarongs instead of dress shirts. They had success for a while with a factory turning silk ties into pillows and other items.
“We finally had to shut that factory down because the list of officials we had to pay to get it to port grew and grew, so we finally had to shut it down,” Wisdom said. “We had the same thing happen in India with leather. We had a factory over there making leather rugs and the Mafia controls all the scraps in India. When the Mafia saw how much scrap we much buying, they kept doubling the price until it was no longer profitable, so we had to close that factory.”
Wisdom and Walker, who have lived together for 43 years, moved back to Eureka Springs earlier this year. Wisdom said one reason for moving back was that they realized that even after 35 years in Little Rock, they had more friends in Eureka Springs than in Little Rock.
“Paul Wilson of Ermilio’s Italian Restaurant is a big reason we moved back,” Wisdom said. “He’s our best friend.”