About

'I grew up in a small town in southern New Jersey called Dividing Creek... If you’re from there, you know it as Split Ditch. I’d spend the days trudging through the mud, swimming, canoeing, water skiing and exploring the little creek that winds its way through the stinkin’ marsh to the Delaware Bay. On the bay the stripers strike hard and the crabs and oysters are plentiful, quite a handful of my younger days were spent working on commercial fishing boats out there with my old man. If you go out of the creek, around egg island, and north up the bay a ways, there smack dab in the middle sits a little cast iron lighthouse on a shoal. Ship John Shoal has always stuck with me as a memory of my growing up. Maybe it's the backwards old-style vocabulary in the name, the beauty of the lighthouse itself, or the fact that you can barely see it from land... I just like it. It's my Hickory Wind. Over the past decade, I've learned from scratch a trade that I now cherish, the trade of leather work. Mistakes have turned to ideas, ideas have created products and designs that are simple, beautiful, and harken back to a time when things were made with care and longevity in mind. I've recently added some trusted hands to pass along what I've learned over these years to keep expanding this vision of mine. Thank you for checking it out, and supporting all of us on this journey.'

~ Cap'n. Mike Elias