Stock & Barrel

Stock & Barrel cuts and stitches its No. 52 wallet by hand in Ogden and sells it for $125. A little further down the same homepage, it sells the pattern for that wallet for $10, with a build-along video, to anyone who would rather make one. The shop sells the finished goods and the instructions side by side.

Parker and Whitney Lichfield started the company in 2012, according to their about page and a 2018 Makerviews interview. Parker told Makerviews that he does all of it for his family. "My #1 goal is to be able to provide for them, and anything after that is just for fun," he said. The homepage says the business grew from one workbench in Ogden, and the course pitch describes a maker who built the shop from a garage.

His advice to other makers was blunt: "there is nothing special about being a copy." In 2017 Thomas and Kaelyn Gulbrandsen joined to take on the business and logistics side, and the about page says the company would not be where it is without them.

The leather is vegetable tanned harness leather from the Wickett & Craig tannery. The No. 52 is a vertical bifold with four card slots and two hidden pockets, and its product page calls it consistently the most popular wallet in the line. The No. 6 belt is cut to the buyer's size from 9/10 ounce Buck Brown harness leather. If a seam fails at year two or year twenty, the homepage says, the shop will repair or replace the piece, and it asks for no registration and no receipt.

One date needs a footnote. The about page and Makerviews both say 2012, while the current homepage says "Est. 2015" and counts more than 16,000 customers since then.

The patterns have grown into a second business. Every PDF comes with full-size cut lines and stitch marks, and a $97 course teaches pricing and phone photography to people who want to sell their own leatherwork. The homepage says more than 1,100 makers have enrolled, and it calls the course "our best-selling product ever." By its own count, the leather company's top seller is a class on how to become its competition.

The finished goods are still the reason the shop exists, and the pitch for them fits in two lines on the homepage: "Cheap leather looks best on day one. Ours looks best on day five thousand." The $10 pattern does not include the five thousand days.