Feathers and Sons

When I started making and selling clips out of my basement, the process (both making them and selling them) was about as stone-age as you can imagine.  I didn’t have a website, only a thread on BladeForums.com.  If someone happened to see the thread, and was interested in a clip, they’d send me an email.  Then I’d send them an email back with a few details - which clip fits what knife, the finish option (just one, sandwashed), how much the clip cost, and how to pay for it.  They’d send me a payment via PayPal (the only option I had figured out at that time).  I’d send them back one more email, saying ‘Got it, thanks so much, the clip will be heading your way soon.’  I’d make the clip, put it in a box, cover it with about 6 stamps, and drop it off at my local post office.

The reason I mention that is because my email address at the time was ‘thelastleaf@fastmail.fm'.  (The Last Leaf is a favorite short story by American author O. Henry, best known for penning The Gift of the Magi.)  Anyways, because the address referenced a leaf, everyone assumed the logo was a leaf, not a feather.  I would rarely correct anyone who mentioned the ‘leaf logo’, but I always thought, ‘Man, maybe I need to re-draw that.  It looks like a feather to me, but apparently not to anyone else!’  

I hope you don’t feel like you’ve wasted two minutes of your life on that anecdote, but it’s an important part of the story because it made me realize that sometimes people will interpret the designs differently than I anticipated.  That really influenced my aesthetic.  The viewer or end-user may not see the object as I intended.  But even so, it needs to function as I intended.  And, as importantly, it needs to be as beautiful as I can make it, regardless of whether the viewer perceives it in the way I had anticipated or not.  Those two things - beauty and functionality - are always my primary goals.

So back to the feather.  There are two reasons why we use the image of a feather on most of our packaging and parts.  The first is specific to the nature of titanium, LNW’s material of choice for most of our kit.  Ti is strong and light.  Feathers are strong and light.  The attributes of a feather represent the attributes of titanium, and vice-versa. 

The second reason is that my dad loved birds.  He had a collection of Lenox and Sadek porcelain birds that he kept in his den.  He loved identifying native species when out in the woods of E Washington and N Idaho, and then trying to find a corresponding figurine.  As often happens, sons will end up loving the same things their dad loved.  (In my case, birds and baseball and motorcycles and westerns.)  Though I didn’t inherit his love of figurines, I do love the beauty and engineering and magic of a bird in flight.  

My dad (center) and his buddies, circa 1976.

My dad passed away a few months ago.  There are days when I’ll catch myself wondering if he’s going to come by the shop to say hi.  Especially on Saturdays, when I’m there alone.  He knew that was the day I’d be working by myself, and that’s when he liked to swing in to visit.  I’ll be sitting at a workbench and hear a car outside, and for a split second wonder if that’s him.  It only takes a moment to realize that it’s not.  But I still like to imagine him walking in, wearing one of our LNW hats.  I ask him what he thinks about our latest design.  He would say it’s great, even if I’m not so sure.   Then we'd talk about the Mariners, or what my brothers are up to.  So I hang on to things that remind me of him, like the feather.  And in a small way, he’s still around.