Introducing The Archive

Since 2010, we've made hundreds of different products, variations, experiments, and one-off pieces. Some became permanent parts of the collection. Others disappeared almost as quickly as they arrived.

We've never had the time to document them.

That's changing.

We've started building The Archive — a catalog of ARTIFACT's small-batch production runs, limited editions, prototypes, and retired designs. Some were produced in runs of a few dozen. Others numbered fewer than twelve. A handful exist as only a single example.

If you've been collecting ARTIFACT for a while, there's a chance something on your shelf is considerably rarer than you realized.

This is very much a work in progress. There are sixteen years of records to sort through, photographs to recover, and production notes to piece together. We'll continue adding new entries as time allows.

If you own an older ARTIFACT product and you're curious about it, send us a photo. We'll dig through our records and see what we can find.

One thing I've been thinking about while building this archive is how easily words lose their meaning.

"Small business" can describe a company with hundreds of employees. "Small batch" can describe a production run of hundreds of pieces.

Those labels aren't wrong, but they can make it difficult to appreciate what production actually looks like inside a company like ours.

Today, ARTIFACT is six people.

Many of the products you'll find in The Archive were cut, sewn, photographed, packed, and shipped by that same small team—or an even smaller one. Sometimes we made six because that's all the material we had. Sometimes we made eleven because that's where the roll ended. Sometimes we made one simply to see if an idea deserved to exist.

The Archive is our attempt to preserve that history before it's forgotten.

You can find The Archive using the link below, from the footer of our website, or in the Collections drop-down in the main navigation.

I hope you enjoy exploring it. 

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