OEN Member NewsWildwood & Company launches Kickstarter campaign for world’s finest wardrobe accessories

Wildwood & Company is a tailoring and design studio in downtown Portland, Ore. We make custom clothing like suits, shirts, and even hand-knit sweaters, all right here in Portland. You can learn more about our custom work and our fine-craft gallery here.

A couple years ago, we started looking for the world’s finest accessories to complement the clothing we make. We were disappointed; the market was awash with overpriced “fashion” brands that use inferior manufacturing methods, mostly overseas, and whose pricing bears no relation to the level of quality they are offering.

So instead, we started working directly with master craftspeople here in Portland to design and create our own accessories.

Our goals: 

• Combine our tailoring passion with the expertise of master metal workers, weavers, woodworkers and others to create the world’s finest accessories right here in Portland. 
• Use the best materials we can find, anywhere.
• It is important to us that the quality of our design, materials, and construction speaks for itself—which is why you won’t see outward-facing logos on our products.
• For the last two years, we’ve been designing, prototyping, and gathering input from our discerning tailoring clients. For example, our solid sterling silver cufflinks have gone through three design iterations to get just the right shape and weight for comfortable wear.

Now, we’re ready to share our first collection of fine Portland-made products with the world. Below are descriptions and pictures of our prototypes, and on the right side of the screen are the rewards for supporting this campaign.

For each product, we are offering a limited number of rewards at less than what the product’s retail price will be—plus free shipping!—to show our gratitude for your early support.

Why Kickstarter?

We have created prototypes of each piece, one at a time—which is simply not economically feasible for producing these objects to share with a wider audience. Even though the specifics are different from object to object, the general principle is the same: Set-up time and high cost of materials on each of these objects only make sense if we can commit to making them in small runs or batches.

More specifically: 

Our classic garment bag is a great example. If people collectively pre-order 50 or more garment bags from us, we can work with a professional fabric-cutter in town to cut fabric for all 50 bags in the same amount of time it would take us to cut out just one bag ourselves. The quality is just as high on the cutting, but basic efficiencies like that are what will actually allow us to sell these bags.

 

Our metal cufflinks, collar stays, and tie clips are created by hand, but the set-up time and expense (particularly with jewelry casting) is prohibitive to make them one at a time. The raw materials like sterling silver are also more cost-effective to buy in quantity.

 

Our weaver takes many hours to warp his floor loom manually before he can weave a single inch—so our handwoven pocket squares only work if we can do them in editions.
Because of set-up time and construction methods, making our aromatic wood sweater boxes one at a time costs about four times as much as doing them in runs of 50 or more, so we’ve determined that 50 is the minimum number that conceivably “pencils out.”

 

Learn more and support the campaign:

Source: www.kickstarter.com