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Our Story

I grew up on Air Force bases as a kid and was surrounded by military life and I think largely because of that, I gravitated towards liking field watches, pilot watches, and other classics.
My dad always wore watches and so did my grandpa and my love for watches started early on from this.

On the left and center, my dad and oldest brother.
On the right, my grandpa and oldest brother.


2012

Around 2012, I wanted to make an awesome leather watch strap that didn't look like all the mass produced watch straps and I started pursuing different manufactures to help me get started.
I found that when you pair an heirloom quality watch with a nice, thick leather strap, it goes together so much better than an all-metal or rubber straps.


I saved this photo in my phone for years as my inspiration for what I was looking for:
At the time, I knew nothing about product manufacturing or running a leather business.
I quickly found that I needed to prepare much more before starting production like getting proper specs, materials, etc. as manufactures needed it.
At the time, me and my wife Jacki did not have the financial means to start a prototype production run - I keep the idea but really don't go anywhere with it.

2013-2014

In 2013-2014 me and Jacki worked traditional jobs and focused on getting our financial house in order by following Dave Ramsey's baby steps.
Our first son, Elijah, was also born in 2014 and Jacki started an kid's apparel company called Little Native because she wanted to make vintage style clothing for our newest little family member.
Most of the clothes were hand screen-printed with designs that Jacki had drawn by hand:
We moved into our first house and needed basic furniture like a bed and dining table.
We quickly realized just how expensive and low quality most furniture is when you get it from the big box stores and instead we started our attempt at making our own furniture.
After making our bed and dining room table, we noticed that other people were looking for the same thing - solid wood, hand-built furniture at a reasonable price.
I took over building furniture and Jacki took over restoring old furniture that we found.
We turned this into a new hobby and started making furniture for friends and family and sold them at local markets.
We decide to combine our two hobbies and named it Arrow & Board.
“Arrow” coming from the Native American clothing brand and “Board” coming from the furniture business.
With this business, we started also making leather stuff like bracelets and bags and naturally my dreams of making a watch strap again came back.


2015

The infamous Apple Watch was released and I absolutely knew I wanted to finally start on the watch strap I envisioned back in 2012.
Because of the manufacturing requirements I've found in the past, I simply try to make a watch band myself and see what happens.
The first few prototypes were pretty bad but I learned a lot of skills with leather working in general and finally made a leather watch band that I'm happy with.
After sporting my Apple Watch with the leather band, I started to get a lot of requests about where I got my watch band.
When the requests became a consistent thing, we decided that it was time to make a bigger investment and pursue a way of making leather watch straps for the Apple Watch.
We started buying tools, supplies, and quality leather to see where we could take things.


2016-Now

As our business grew, we learned a ton through our mistakes and successes.
We continued to learn and used most profits for buying better equipment and quality materials.
We learned how to make new products like wallets, belts, and other accessories.

We've since expanded our products into what you see today.
Our Artisan collection are products that are crafted in our same studio building with all the same materials and typically done all by hand.


Our Essential collection are products that are first build and designed in our studio and once we perfect a design, we have our partner manufacture them at scale but with the same great quality leather and materials.