Ah, the impotence of the urban dweller. Ever since the Best Made Company axe debuted this spring, you’d be hard-pressed to find a New Yorker who isn’t dying to snap open that wooden case and heave the Tennessee hickory–handled thing at… well, what, exactly? “At first I thought a lot of New Yorkers would buy them,” says Peter Buchanan-Smith, the New York–based graphic designer who founded the company along with his childhood pal Graeme Cameron. But it turns out the best audience for an axe — even one with a handle saturated in gorgeous shades of spray paint — is a person who actually might use an axe. “A woman from Flin Flon, Manitoba, called us up a couple of months ago and ordered six axes for her six sons,” says Buchanan-Smith. “Now she’s going be a contributor to our blog.”
For Buchanan-Smith and Cameron, Best Made was never about making a showpiece for urban hipsters, though that’s the demographic that’s been swooning over the pieces in print and onblogs. But the axes were always meant to be shown. “An axe shouldn’t be kept in some dark corner of a tool shed,” says Best Made’s website. “Best Made axes are beautiful objects and timeless instruments: they will inspire for generations, they are to be collected, treasured, and used to chop wood or limb some branches.” Buchanan-Smith should know: He grew up on a farm an hour outside of Toronto and met Cameron in the early ’80s at Camp Ahmek, an all-boys camp in Northern Ontario’s Algonquin Park. “That camp wasn’t about keeping kids distracted, it was about skills,” says Buchanan-Smith. “God help you if you lost your axe on a canoe trip.” Growing up, Buchanan-Smith’s father kept an axe with a yellow safety band covering its throat, and that splash of color is what gave the Best Made axe its original inspiration.
In his short career, Buchanan-Smith has been the designer responsible for some major pop artifacts — book covers for Maira Kalman, lookbooks and branding for Isaac Mizrahi, the redesign of Paper magazine, the New York Times Op-Ed page, and Wilco’s Grammy Award–winning A Ghost is Born album cover. But with Best Made, he says, “I feel like I’m scratching an itch that needed to be scratched.” Buchanan-Smith recently took time out to lead me around the studio for an inside look at the making of the Best Made axe.
“In a way, Best Made was actually a product of the recession,” says Buchanan-Smith. “I had to close my office and lay off my staff. I was living in New Jersey and I had this garage I’d always wanted to use as a workshop.” The first few prototypes were painted there; now the axes are forged in Maine by America’s oldest axe-maker then hand-painted here, in Buchanan-Smith’s Tribeca studio.
“Andy Spade was opening his new store, Partners & Spade, and he asked me to send some ideas. I’d collected a couple of old axes (pictured above), including one I bought on eBay for $10, just a basic utility ax with no paint on it. Growing up, my dad’s axe had a yellow safety band, and it seemed like it should have some color on it. I showed it to Andy, and he said, yes, definitely, let’s do it.”
Axes awaiting a paint job. At the beginning, Buchanan-Smith did a few custom orders, but ultimately decided it was too time-consuming to make each model one-of-a-kind. Now the paint is sprayed on in set patterns. “We’ll pull models from the site and close out seasons, just like in fashion,” says Buchanan-Smith. “And we’ll occasionally bring back old favorites. We just want to make sure we don’t make the same shit all the time.”
Axe-making supplies.
There are four perennial styles in the collection, named for the four guiding principles of the company: Fortitude, Courage, Grace, and Compassion. That’s them lined up on the right, in solid colors; Fortitude, a deep purple, is the most popular. The rest of the patterns and colors are seasonal.
Random bits of inspiration for the Fall 2009 collection.
Two Zephyr models from the Summer 2009 collection. “Graeme and I name each axe,” Buchanan-Smith says. “We think of the axes as our ambassadors, so the naming is really important. It’s a combination of coming up with a great name but also having it mean something to us personally.” The names are etched into the handle of each axe.
On the wall, Buchanan-Smith keeps an archive of past and current designs. “There’s a model in the fall collection called Blanchetta, after Cate Blanchett. The handle is the hue of her blonde hair, but we also thought there was something romantic about naming an axe after a movie star. It seems like something you would’ve done in the old days, only with a racing horse.”
Other models include Piobaireachd of Donald Dubh, named for a famous bagpipe song (Buchanan-Smith’s father is Scottish); Pale Male, named after the Central Park red-tailed hawk; and Dileas Gu Bas, the Gaelic motto (“Faithful Until Death”) of Cameron’s unit from his days in the Canadian army.
Each axe arrives with a custom pine box marked with a red Best Made X, on a bed of wood wool (it’s what they use to stuff taxidermy).
A certificate of authenticity is enclosed.
A leather blade guard is optional.
Isaac Mizrahi, a longtime friend and collaborator of Buchanan-Smith’s, sent his Spring 2010 models down the runway carrying Best Made boxes.
In his studio, Buchanan-Smith keeps a map of Canada, which is where Cameron — who manages what they call “the tribe” — lives and works. “The most exciting thing has been the outpouring of support,” says Buchanan-Smith. They’ll soon be paying it back — this year will see the creation of a Best Made blog, built around the notion of a campfire, with members of the tribe invited to participate. “It’s where people out on the fringe will come and tell stories. For instance, our printer in Winnipeg is an ice fisherman. He’s basically going to write a living piece about the culture of the ice shanty.”
Buchanan-Smith with his original $10 eBay axe. Its name is Champion, and it was manufactured by Kelly Works. “The more technical we get, the more styles we offer, and the more we let the customer dictate, the more we become the axe guys. But we’re not an axe company, even though we are right now. For us, it’s a perch from which to build a brand.”
This story was originally published on November 3, 2009. A year and a half later, Dror Benshetrit unveiled at the New Museum a simple, scalable structural joint system called QuaDror, which just may turn out to be his magnum opus. It takes obvious inspiration from the kinds of toys he shared with Sight Unseen here. // Some furniture expands if you’re having extra dinner guests, or folds if you’re schlepping it to a picnic. But most of it just sits there, content to be rather than do. This drives New York–based designer Dror Benshetrit crazy. “Static freaks me out,” he’s said, and so the Design Academy Eindhoven graduate has spent the entirety of his young career making things that either capture a state of transformation (his progressively shattered series of vases for Rosenthal) or actually transform themselves (the Pick Chair and Folding Sofa that flatten using simple mechanics). When I first saw Dror’s latest project, a trivet for Alessi whose concentric metal arcs are magnetized so they can be reconfigured endlessly — and even, the designer enthusiasticaly suggests, worn as a necklace — I thought: If he can’t even let a trivet sit still then his fascination with movement must be more than a design philosophy, it’s probably coded in his DNA. I was right. Dror has been obsessed with kinetic toys since he was a child.
The scientific process behind many of life’s workaday phenomena is something called capillary action, which is the molecular attraction that makes liquid flow through a porous medium, for those in need of a high-school refresher. It’s what makes tears flow through your lachrymal ducts, what gives micro-fiber its super-absorbent properties, and why groundwater naturally spreads into areas of dry soil. It’s also what powers the Ink Calendar by Oscar Diaz.
When most of us get a package in the mail, it’s the book we ordered from Amazon, or a birthday gift from our parents. When Bec Brittain gets a package, it’s usually full of dead bugs. She orders them in bulk off the internet for a dollar a pop, then chops them into pieces and transforms them into hybrid bug-monsters.
