When I started Iron Grove, I had always imagined a collective. A small group of artisans coming together for a meaningful goal; to make tools in what I call the Old Way. That's actually why I chose to name our shop "...Tool Company" over just my name or something more specific to me alone. I was and still am interested in creating something larger than myself. A family, a community, a company.
And surveying where we are today, I am certainly in good company.
Coming Together
I've written here before about our bulk production work for some awesome businesses like Mill Scale Metalworks, Filson, 44 Farms, Huckberry, Kimono Joe and other name brand retailers that aren't sold through our website and rarely make the social media rounds. Well, wanting a collective is one thing but it was partnerships with these bigger names that really made it possible. With our first job for Filson, making 500 hand forged grilling tools, I reached out to some fellow craftsmen for help and began the first steps of what we now denote The Homestead Collection. After hammering out some bulk orders together for others, and with our own website often out of stock, we turned our attention to house-designed takes on classic culinary knife models, now handmade as a team, that are streamlined and repeatable enough to make in small batches and keep readily available for purchase. (you know, like a regular business usually does!)
Shoulder to shoulder
In January of 2024 we officially launched our Homestead Collection to segment the idea from what had always been my solo work. Hand crafted by Mark "Red" McCombs(right), Caleb Cleaver (left) and me. Each tool in our Homestead Collection is worked on as a team, with myself typically forging the steel and the blades themselves, Mark as our resident heat treat and handle-maker and Caleb going to town on the grinders to finished them out. All of our positions in this Collection overlap, occasionally we outright swap places, but as our workflow has progressed, we've hit a hard-work homeostasis that leads me to believe there's no real limit to what we can make as a team. Each tool passes through all of our hands, often multiple times, and shows a beautiful fusion of our individual crafting styles and abilities. As we can make better tools faster, we've even been able to lower their retail prices and hopefully make them more accessible to working cooks and backyard enthusiast who want the performance of a handmade tool without the overly artsy price tag.
As we expand on this Collection, we've also made use of talented machinist Christopher Ortega, a long-time friend of mine from growing up in Houston that falls in to mill our steak knife boxes and other wood accessories, and amazing seamstress Sara Cormier who, while helping Lynne work with our homeschooled children as a certified teacher, manages to stitch, sew and knit with the best of them for our bigger leather projects and parts of a new line of Iron Grove home goods soon to be announced.
Teamwork is Dreamwork
The Homestead Collection is our effort to stay connected with those that really put our tools to hard use and desire simple performance-driven tools done well. It's our goal here to make these tools competitive to high end commercial brands while skipping out on the factory imports and robotic machinery for what we truly believe to be a Better Way. The Old Way. The Homestead Way. The hard work of united craftsmen pointed in a singular direction, hand forged on our Dripping Springs homestead and always guaranteed for life.
-Daniel
See the latest Homestead Collection here.
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