Fly Fishing Insider Podcast
Whiskey Leather Works is a small-batch leather goods company in Missoula, Montana, run by a husband-and-wife team. It makes belts with hand-forged buckles, wallets and flasks stitched with retired fly line, dog collars and leashes, and bison-leather flip-flops, all made to order in a single shop.
Dan and Ally are the husband-and-wife owners of Whiskey Leather Works, a small-batch leather goods company based in Missoula, Montana.
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How did Whiskey Leather Works start?
Whiskey Leather Works began on a garage workbench in Missoula around 2014 and 2015 as a creative outlet for a working environmental consultant whose hydrogeology and remediation jobs kept him on the road and away from his wife and two daughters. The first product came from a neighbor bringing over an American-made belt whose buckle had fallen apart; the answer was not just to fix it but to make a better one. Belts led to wallets, and the side business grew until the choice was to go all in or shut it down. He left consulting, Ally came on as co-owner and director of sales and marketing in October 2018, and growth accelerated from there.
What makes a Whiskey Leather Works belt different?
Plenty of companies make a belt from US-tanned full-grain leather, so Whiskey Leather Works set itself apart at the buckle. The founder sought out a metalsmith in Missoula, spent time in his shop looking at his other work, and together they developed a hand-forged buckle series in solid copper, bronze and stainless steel, plus forged carbon steel pieces. One of those carries a fish-scale pattern. The hand-forged buckle belt remains the company's foundational product and the piece everything else was built around.
How did retired fly line end up stitched into a wallet?
The company's first product aimed at fly anglers came from a night in the garage changing out a fly line. About to throw the old line in the trash, the founder wondered how it would work as a lacing material, and had a fly-line-stitched wallet finished roughly an hour later. Shown around to friends and locals, the reception was strong enough to build a product line on, and the same fly line stitch now appears on a flask. The design brief is deliberately restrained: enough of a fly fishing element to be noticed and appreciated by another angler, but nothing that reads as a billboard.
How did the company grow without a storefront?
Whiskey Leather Works has no brick-and-mortar store and grew up entirely on social media before anyone with a marketing background was involved. When Ally joined, her assessment after 20 years in sales and marketing was that her job was mostly to enter a conversation that was already happening: the individual comments, shares and reposts from the fly fishing and outdoors community are what built the customer base. That community response is also what she describes as the easiest sell of her career, and the reason the growth reads as organic rather than bought.
How does a small maker survive a shutdown?
When the shop shut down in April 2020, the founder was standing alone in it with no answer to what happens next. A friend who runs another fly fishing leather-goods brand called, heard the situation, and wrote out step-by-step instructions for a share-the-shop model he was running himself, then spent 45 minutes on the phone tailoring it to Whiskey Leather Works. The company credits that call, and the willingness of a nominal competitor to hand over a working playbook, with keeping the business alive. They passed the same model on to contacts in the distilling industry.
What goes into the Whiskey Leather Works flip-flops?
The idea came from a friend around a campfire during a Father's Day overnight float on the Blackfoot River. Sourcing followed two criteria: domestic production and a partner with the same ethos and environmental values. That partner turned out to be a flip-flop company in Georgia, which supplies the soles; the uppers are full-grain bison leather with the company's fish-print webbing, cut and assembled in the Missoula shop. Prototypes went out to Instagram contacts with a questionnaire, and the founder wore test pairs from January onward, including through snow, to log hours on them.
How does a two-person shop scale without losing quality?
Every order that leaves the shop carries a handwritten thank-you note, and almost everything is made to order rather than pulled from a shelf, so growth threatens exactly the things the customers are buying. The answer has been deliberately slow hiring: one full-time shop employee, a jewelry smith by training who also makes her own bolo ties using the company's leather, plus a second hire covering sales, marketing and production. The five-year picture is a larger shop, more hands, and two daughters, 15 and 13 at the time, who have said they want to take the company over.
Key takeaways
- A hand-forged buckle in copper, bronze, stainless or carbon steel is what separates the belts from other US-tanned full-grain leather belts.
- Retired fly line works as a lacing material and became the company's signature detail on wallets and flasks.
- The company grew on social media before it had any marketing staff, and still has no brick-and-mortar store.
- Every order ships with a handwritten note and nearly everything is made to order, which is the constraint that shapes how fast the shop can grow.
- The flip-flops pair soles from a Georgia manufacturer with full-grain bison leather uppers assembled in Missoula, after months of wear-testing by prototype recipients.
- A shared operating playbook from another small brand in the same industry is what carried the shop through the April 2020 shutdown.
