About Field & Cairn Trading Co.
We started in a one-room workshop in the foothills outside of Boulder, Colorado — a former auto-body bay with a single big garage door we kept open through summer. Three of us, two industrial sewing machines, a stack of waxed canvas, and a Kingsley gold-foil stamping press we’d bought at an estate auction from a retired bookbinder in Denver.
The first thing we made was a leather card case for a friend who’d lost three nylon wallets over a single season of climbing trips. Then a notebook for another friend who took field notes on the kind of waterproof paper that doesn’t take a good pen. Then a brass compass keychain because we’d been carrying a too-heavy plastic one and got tired of it. Each piece existed because someone we knew needed something done better than the available version.
That’s still how the line grows. We don’t release a product unless one of us has been carrying or using the prototype for at least a season. We don’t outsource finish work. We don’t substitute materials when our preferred supplier is briefly tight on inventory — we wait.
What we make
Heritage outdoor goods and everyday-carry objects: enamel mugs and stainless flasks, wool watch caps and merino socks, brass hardware and walnut-handled knives, saddle-leather card cases and waxed-canvas notebooks. The line is intentionally narrow. Twelve products, each one we’re willing to put our maker’s mark on.
Where we source
Our waxed canvas is Martexin 14oz and 18oz, woven and waxed in New Jersey. Our cordovan saddle leather comes from Horween in Chicago — the same tannery that has supplied American leather goods makers since 1905. Our brass is milled in a small machine shop in upstate New York from sand-cast bar stock. The merino wool in our socks and watch caps is sourced from a Wyoming sheep farmer and spun at a heritage mill in Maine.
Nothing in our line comes from a supplier we haven’t visited in person. If a material is back-ordered, we’d rather wait than send something less.
How we work
Six people work in the Boulder workshop now. Every leather piece is hand-cut and hand-stitched with waxed Tiger thread on saddle stitching ponies. Larger canvas pieces use a heavy industrial Cobra Class 4 machine for the long seams, with hand-stitching at every stress point. The maker’s seal is debossed and gold-foiled by hand on the 1953 Kingsley press we restored two years ago. It’s slower than outsourcing the stamping but the result sits sharper in the leather.
The maker’s seal
Our logo — the circular seal reading “FIELD & CAIRN TRADING CO. · BOULDER · COLORADO · EST. 1952” with a small stacked-stone cairn at the center — appears on every product we make. The 1952 date references the founding of the Colorado Mountain Club’s Boulder section, which we like as a heritage anchor for the kind of outdoor object we want to make: built once, built well, marked with care.
What we stand behind
One-year manufacturer’s warranty on every piece we sell. Thirty-day no-questions return on unused merchandise. Lifetime repair service on stitching at cost — if a seam pulls loose ten years from now, send it back and we’ll re-stitch it for the price of shipping plus thread.
You can read the full Terms of Sale, Shipping Policy, Returns Policy, and Privacy Policy for details. If anything is ever unclear, write to hello@ascendforyou.store and a real person at a workbench will reply.