Bison Made from The State Press on Vimeo.
For all his innovations, from the wheel to the tablet computer, man's most useful tools are his hands. Matt Pisarcik’s do not stop moving. He drives screws into thick leather straps with an electronic screwdriver. As he finishes each razor strop, he strokes each one with the palm of his hand like a good cat.
As an observer, Bison Made’s practices were unfamiliar to me, but as a writer and cook, I could identify with its spirit and practice of craft.
Bison Made's workshop is situated in downtown Phoenix's monOrchid. The warehouse on the corner of Third and Roosevelt Street is a collaborative entrepreneurial workspace home to a plethora of small businesses. The workshop is intimate. A large carpet-lined worktable sits in the middle of the space. Tools
The toys of the Bison Made men.Photo by Ryan Marcus-Espinoza
and hundreds of leather swatches hang from pegboards on the walls. Resting on the little available counter space are clear plastic bins full of cut leather pieces waiting to be stitched and assembled into finished wallets and razor strops.
In the middle of the table is a wooden box full of vintage safety razors, from which Sandersius produces a slim red leather case embossed in gold lettering. "Those are the types of things we miss in consumer products," Sandersius says.
Pisarcik's beard is tailored immaculate, his black hair parted just so. He works attentively, as if each razor strop were destined to be put on display and signed with his name for the world to see and judge. Marred or scratched pieces of leather are discarded, deemed unfit for production. The imperfections are often small, sometimes imperceptibly so. One of the pieces has a small bite mark in its corner, a shallow pit hardly visibly in the tan leather.
"I can't change that, but guess what? It's not good enough," says Pisarcik as he chucks the piece into his scrap bin.
Pisarcik and his business partner Sebastian Sandersius met in high school where they played together in a prog rock band. Think U2 meets Radiohead. Sebastian was a drummer, while Matt played guitar and wrote songs. The two continued making music throughout college at ASU.
The two are bladeheads at heart. Destitute and dissatisfied with the Gillette MACH3 cartridge-style razor, Pisarcik began antiquing for shaving alternatives. He bought a vintage safety razor from an antique store beside the gay Denny's on Seventh street and Camelback. He brought it home, restored it and began collecting. Pisarcik's girlfriend at the time had little interest in antique shaving products, so he brought Sebastian along, instead.
The two soon found that instead of collecting one razor at a time, they could buy two and sell the second, whose profits would pay for the first. By leveraging the
Matt Pisarcik holds his hand's work.Photo by Ryan Marcus-Espinoza
restored razors against one another, they built a business called Razor Emporium, an online store for vintage shaving products. Along the way, the Brothers Bison amassed a razor collection said to be one of the ten largest in the world. In glass display cases at his home, Pisarcik has over 500 razors spanning from 1904 to 1978.
Bison Made was born out of their ambition to create their own straight razor. They began working with leather to make a case for it.
A Bison Made strop is all about the draw, the friction created when running a razor against it.
"When I use my straight razor, I like to really feel the leather pulling on it," he says. His eyes move to the back of his head as he describes the process, like a man describing the best thing he has ever tasted. "You really feel a connection with the leather."
Bison Made also makes wallets. Stitched and assembled by hand, each piece is a study in craftsmanship. I volunteered to stitch one myself, despite Sandersius's warnings that my first was sure to be my most time-consuming. Sandersius showed me how to thread a needle, itself an exercise in gentle precision. Pinching the thick thread between his index finger and thumb he slides the needle's eye between his fingers "just like that." The technique is deceptively simple. What took Sebastian less than a second took me 20 minutes to get right. Stitching one wallet took me over three hours.
"Sebastian is exceptionally particular with stitching," says Brandon Wells, a manager training to supervise operations at Bison Made. "There's a system to the stitching to make it look and function a particular way."
Wells loves the smell of leather and finds the process of stitching wallets rewarding. "I recognize everything I touch was once living and try to respect that," he says. Making leather wallets is to rebirth that which once lived and breathed. "It's a way to utilize and animal's life to give something beautiful to someone."
"If the stitching isn't good, then it has to be redone," Sandersius says in response.
The appearance of his products is of the utmost importance to Sandersius. He demands nothing less than perfection. Sandersius is a physics Ph.D. (ASU) and scientific precision is a virtue at Bison Made. Though all of its products are stitched and assembled by hand, the designs begin in Autocad, a 3D drafting program used to design everything from cars to aircraft.
Perfect instruments.Photo by Ryan Marcus-Espinoza
The leather used in a Bison Made's products is of the highest quality. It sources most of its leather from a Chicago tannery called Horween, said to be the oldest in the country. Horween supplies leather to premier shoe manufacturers like Allen Edmonds, whose dress shoes can fetch prices north of $500 a pair.
Bison Made's motto is "made for life." Pisarcik and Sandersius intend for each of their wallets and razor strops to last several lifetimes. They aim to create heirlooms that can be handed down for generations.
"Bison represents a return to quality and tradition," says Daniel Mills, Bison Made's PR man. He is young at 21, but speaks with the knowing intonation of a man who has worked for his living. He graduated from ASU with an English Literature degree, but found himself exhausted of the intellectual grind of academia. He answered a help wanted add on a coffee shop bulletin board for wallet stitchers and found solace in working with his hands. Like everyone else at the four-man company, Daniel stitches wallets by hand in the quiet workshop.
After a day of tedious stitching, each man leaves work exhausted. Concentrating on the intricate task of stitching for hours at a time is a mental gauntlet. Like so many craftsman, their work wears on the hands. Wells's fingers are stiff every morning.
He holds a new sewn eight-pocket wallet between his fingers. "When I pass this off, it has my energy in it," he says. Craft, at its purest form, is alchemy. Once assembled by a craftsman's attentive hands, his products are no longer commodities, they are experiences in themselves.
Mills says that today's is a "throwaway culture," that the products we purchase and consume are either too complicated or shoddily manufactured to stand the test of time.
The men of Bison Made work towards perfection.Photo by Luu Nguyen
"There are no secrets to what we do," Mills says. "No tricks. Everything is all cut and dried."
Though simplicity may, in part, define the Bison Made way, their processes and products are deceptively mundane. Quality and artisanal excellence lie in minute details and subtle adjustments that can take a lifetime to master. The craftsman at bison made follow perfection, making strides one stitch at a time.
Reach the writer at rjespin1@asu.edu or via Twitter @scotchandfoie
