BUILT TO LAST

Wingback is turning its back on throw-away culture, in favour of creating products that last for generations. Stephen Holmes meets the team adding digital design touches to the creation of traditional leather and metal accessories that I particularly liked, so I decided to make my own.”

Sat in Wingback’s London headquarters, Alasdair MacLaine pulls his great-grandad’s brass mechanical screwdriver from his pocket and admires it.

The screwdriver’s aged brass body is standing up well to its years in service. Not that it’s used much today, given the new workshop that MacLaine has at his disposal, replete with tools, 3D printer, leather-working benches and photography area.

Situated at OXO Tower Wharf on London’s South Bank, the workshop is part of Wingback’s design studio and showroom. The iconic art deco building in which it is located is as old as the screwdriver itself, but also provides a modern home for an exciting list of young hardware companies.

The idea of blending of traditional materials and new ideas is completely in step with the ethos behind Wingback itself. As a producer of leather goods, accessories and stationery, every product is designed to last a lifetime, and then some.

The inspiration for its stationery line came directly from that inherited screwdriver, but the company’s starting point can be traced back to founder and design director MacLaine’s time working at Dyson, in its new product innovation department. There, he was given carte blanche to come up with new concepts, and an extensive R&D budget.

Having laser-cut and hand-stitched the prototype cardholder, MacLaine took it into work to show some of his colleagues, who immediately wanted one.

“I bought a little [leather] hide from a cobbler and made a few of them, and then it clicked: that’s the product that should be launched, it’s so simple.”

Marrying Tradition And Modern Tech

The product was further refined, marrying the tradition of leather working and saddle stitching with modern laser cutting engraving to make the stitching process more exact and efficient versus manual punching. From there, it was offered up to the crowdfunding gods on Kickstarter. Things went far better than expected, raising around £21k in the campaign’s launch month.

Quickly, a single toe in the water on Kickstarter became a winter spent fulfilling launch orders, designing a website, setting up a Shopify account, adding product photography and designing a full range of products.

“It was hard work,” says MacLaine, “trudging down to the shed in mid-December, when it was snowing outside, just to go clean up leather and stitch stuff up. But it was good fun!”

Fast forward a few years and Wingback has expanded its range of leather goods, but the itch to design more technical products returned, and MacLaine began to accurately produce the moving parts. disposable pens and cheap wallets and contribute greatly to the 8 million tons of plastic waste dumped in our oceans every year.

MacLaine says another of the Form 3 resins, Clear, will be useful as mechanisms continue to develop and grow more complex, allowing him to see what’s going on inside and remedy any design issues.

The Formlabs Flexible resins are used for gasket designs, which form part of Wingback’s belt-and-braces approach to long-lasting, functional design – such as the double seals on the lid and neck of its flasks, promising an end to leaks and drips.

Valuable Feedback

While product details are honed by the designers, using crowdfunding for initial launches has enabled Wingback to remain lean while it gauges likely demand. Decisions such as determining a coating finish for a new black pocket flask are made by the team, but the product’s popularity and feedback from a Kickstarter run often influences what eventually appears as a full production run.

The company also takes care to develop limited edition models that include etched artwork. “It’s really nice to work with artists, because we’re promoting them, they’re promoting us, and you end up with a collaborative product.”

MacLaine adds that, for him, this works better than the current trend for investing heavily in influencers to spread marketing around social media.

Also off the list are discounted items. “We’ve got a policy not to hold sales as a business,” he says. “I think sales are quite devaluing for brands, and it’s a pretty slippery slope. And also, we charge an honest price for the products we’re selling. We make a little bit of money on them, but they cost an awful lot to make, hence the price point. So any kind of discounting I feel kind of cheapens the product a little bit.”

This all falls into the idea that, if a product lasts as long as it is designed to, not only will it represent better value for the user and have less environmental impact, but also it will also take on more meaning.

“The kind of product we’re making is one that you hope transcends beyond functional beautiful products and becomes one of those things you have an emotional connection to over time,” explains MacLaine, still holding his great-grandad’s screwdriver, over a century on from when it was made.

With a product range built with the same solidity, the next 100 years shouldn’t be a problem. www.wingback.co.uk

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● 3 Attention to detail is a hallmark of Wingback products

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The millennia it takes to form a natural wonder are thrown into sharp focus when huge swathes of it can be damaged or destroyed in only a few weeks.

This is sadly true of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, where elevated sea water temperatures are causing unprecedented damage, including mass coral bleaching events like the one that killed between 30% and 50% of the reef’s coral in 2016 and 2017.

Bleaching occurs when environmental stressors, even a water temperature rise of just 1°C, cause corals to expel symbiotic algae living inside them, turning the corals white and often killing them.

Over the last 30 years, mass bleaching events have grown in frequency and severity, leaving biologists battling to restore coral and save their delicate ecosystems.

One method is transplanting coral from existing colonies, but it can take as long as 10 years for them to grow their own adult-sized skeletons, requiring a huge amount of manual tending and cultivating.

Seeking a better means of repopulating the reefs, Australian coral biologist Dr Taryn Foster has developed a new, large-scale method that uses the latest digital tools in conjunction with traditional masonry manufacturing.

Leaning on knowledge gained from her family’s business, which makes masonry products for the construction industry, Foster founded the company Coral