Shop Friends: Robert Eppley

Features

October 01, 2024

Robert Eppley is a Bay Area-based photographer, car enthusiast, and one of the co-founders of OTS and Co. Merging his lifelong passions for cars, travel, and photography, Robert has carved out a unique path in the automotive industry over the past several years. He currently manages OTS’ sales and daily operations, and can often be found photographing their latest collector’s cars with his ILE Photo Bag Prime in tow.

We joined Robert on a recent afternoon to learn more about his journey and see his Photo Bag in action as he documented a beautiful 1981 Citroën CX. Check out our interview below:

Robert, tell us a bit about yourself, what you do for a living, and your interests outside of work.

I'm a Bay Area native. I grew up in the East Bay and came back to live in Berkeley after college in 2019 (four years of the East Coast was enough for me). Today I run a collector car sales business with two business partners called OTS and Co. Luckily for me our business wraps a lot of my interests (photography, cars, traveling, yapping, videography) into one job.

How did you get started in the automotive industry, and what was your journey leading up to OTS?

I've always had a pretty strong pull toward everything automotive and found photography to be a useful way to insert myself into a lot of car communities when I was in high school and college. Later during the pandemic - and following a conversation with one of my current business partners - I decided to leave my job to explore working in the automotive industry. I had a sort of distant dream of having a job that allowed me to travel to new places and explore car culture around the world.

My first big stepping stone to getting to know the industry was starting an automotive lifestyle brand and club called VALT with two of my best friends, Joe Ottati and Shaun Charles. That path eventually led to me launching OTS with my two business partners, Derek Tam-Scott and Tazio Ottis. Despite being just nine months into building our new business, we’ve seen a ton of success early on with both our public sales and private client work.

Aside from managing operations and processing our inventory, my biggest project for the remainder of the year is building out a media and merchandise side of our business to engage our growing community of car enthusiasts and collectors.

What ILE pieces are you carrying? How do they complement your daily life?

I think I can count on one hand the number of times I have left my house in the last two years without my Photo Bag Prime. It functions well for everything from transporting day-to-day necessities to being a carry-on for multi week trips abroad. (I’ve also got a Hydration Holster attached to the side of the bag which is a great add-on for photo shoots in the middle of nowhere!)

For my daily needs the Photo Bag Prime protects all of the electronics that go everywhere with me - camera, lenses, hard drive(s), laptop, and chargers. Whenever I’m traveling for an extended period of time I’m able to squeeze a pretty shocking amount of stuff into the bag. Funnily enough, because of how modular the design is, it functions as a great travel bag. The compartment layout makes it very easy to access everything in a rush through TSA, a detail I had not considered prior to traveling with it.

Despite being someone who is known for going through items in my wardrobe suspiciously fast I have somehow not broken or torn a single piece of the bag. It is truly a buy-it-for-life item.

What's the story behind the Citroën CX?

Replacing the iconic DS in 1975, the Citroën CX typifies everything that made the company’s cars so extraordinary. Highly technically innovative, thoroughly quirky, and profoundly aesthetic, the CX transformed what should have been a dull executive car into something sensorially whimsical in a fabulously French way. Despite its wackiness, more than a million were sold, although almost none of them are in the United States.