About Us

Origins:

I started Braithwaite Wallets after dropping out of my music composition degree at the University of Victoria. After I dropped out, I moved back to Calgary and worked a series of entry-level office jobs, never getting ahead on the debt that I had accrued as a student. 

The decision was made that in order to pay off my student and credit card debt, I needed to go and work in the Albertan oil sands region doing seismic exploration. During the time that I was covered in mud, drilling holes, and loading them with 1kg explosives in the middle of the Canadian winter, I thought that it was going to be really great being free of debt. Furthermore, it would be great to have a really nice wallet to put all of my money, that I didn't owe to anybody, into! So, I started fantasizing about what this dream wallet would look like...

Trying to find someone who could just make a custom wallet proved to be VERY difficult. Calgary has a real "western" kind of flair and we raise a lot of cattle here (Alberta beef is truly some of the best in the world; we're spoiled up here) so I thought it would be easy to find a "custom leather worker"... Ummm, no.

At this point, the story of this business sounds just like the story of anyone else's business: 'I couldn't find "x" (wallets) so I thought that I would design and make "x" for myself. I figured that there would be more people who were like me and that they would like to buy "x" also.' As such, I got into business!

(The funny thing about this is that I never actually did make or prototype the wallet that I had been thinking about while I worked in the oil sands area; it was black with red corduroy lining.)

The middle part:

I realized right from my very first customer (Ella! You're awesome!) that the people who bought my wallets were really cool people and that we had a lot of stuff in common.

Slowly over time, people learned about Braithwaite and the word got out on some really respected blogs. My customer list of Really Cool People kept building now to include employees of Amazon, Google, Bioware, Industrial Light and Magic, Microsoft, and Disney; business owners, artists, film makers, "PR guys", respected cardiac surgeons, yoga instructors, touring magicians, early internet innovators, "the guy in your company who knows everything", really dedicated IT guys, people who "give a shit", "punk-rock" pastors, Ruby-on-Rails programmers (actually, programmers of all types), visual merchandisers, industrial designers, film actors, film directors, university administration types with attitude, med students, immigration attorneys, internet marketing "super-gurus", respected novelists, etc. 

The thing that everyone has in common? We all want to make the world a better place and we all work really hard to make that happen, in our own ways.

Where we're at now:

Braithwaite Wallets is never going to be "huge". You won't read about us in GQ or in a fashion magazine. 

This may be because a "Braithwaite" person cannot be effectively "targeted" with advertising. We're everywhere and we're into everything but we aren't in any one place or doing any one thing. Right now, there is a "Braithwaite" person waiting tables at a restaurant, another saving a life in an ER, another driving home to spend time with his daughter, another sitting down to write her book, another thinking about how to start a business, another working at your nearest university, another creating CG animation on the movie you will watch next summer, and another acting on your favorite TV show.

If you are watching closely, you will find us on a Twitter feed, on some blogs, in a Facebook post, on Reddit, in some forum post you saw one time, through a good friend who decides to share one of his best-kept secrets with you, or in a record store when you saw the person in front of you pull out this interesting looking wallet...