About Madera Woodworks Co
Madera Woodworks Co was a small Australian timber craft brand active between 2014 and 2017, run out of a single workshop in inner-west Sydney. The brand is now a quiet archive.
Origin
The studio started in 2014 with a single brief. Build a bifold wallet out of solid hardwood, with no metal hinge, no leather lining, and no visible fasteners. The first prototype was a piece of New York White Oak, two thin halves clamped over an elastic band, cut on a small benchtop saw and finished with food-safe oil. That prototype became The Union, and a year later it was the brand's most recognised piece.
How we worked
Everything was made in small batches. The hardwood billets were cut to size, planed flat, sanded through four grits, finished with a blend of pure tung oil and beeswax, and then matched in pairs by grain so a buyer's wallet always had two halves cut from the same board. The elastic was sourced locally. The packaging was unbleached kraft. Production volume was deliberately low. We made what we could finish properly.
Materials and sourcing
Three timbers carried the line. American White Oak, harvested from managed forestry land in New York state, certified for sustainable yield. Black Walnut, sourced through the same supply chain. Black Cherry, the most expressive of the three in colour. We avoided rainforest hardwoods entirely. There is more on the sourcing decision in the journal.
Press and recognition
The Union and Convoy were covered by a handful of design and tech publications between 2014 and 2017, including PopSci, Designboom and TrendHunter. Convoy ran a small Indiegogo campaign in 2015 to fund the mould tooling for the elastomer body. The campaign hit its target and shipped on schedule.
Where the brand sits now
We stopped taking orders at the end of 2017 and wound down the remaining stock through the first quarter of 2018. The reasons are documented in the retrospective. Madera Woodworks Co is no longer a working production studio. It is preserved as a journal and an archive of the original product line. If you are looking for the product pages, they are listed on the collections index.
The team, then and now
At its peak Madera Woodworks Co was a two-and-a-half person operation. A founder running design and production, a part-time finisher running the sanding and oil-application stages, and a freelance photographer who handled product shots in batches every few months. There was no investor, no agency, no marketing retainer. The Indiegogo funds for the Convoy tooling came in and went straight back out into the mould. The margin on the wallets was reinvested into the next batch of timber and the next print run of packaging. It was a deliberately small operation and it stayed that way.
Today the brand is run as a one-person archive. The journal is written, edited and published by the same person who designed the original Union prototype in 2014. There is no production crew because there is no production. Press requests, licensing enquiries and archival photo requests come through the contact page and are answered on a slow but reliable cadence.
Workshop notes
The original Sydney workshop is gone, leased back to the building owner in early 2018 and converted into a yoga studio later that year. A small set of the original tooling (a benchtop bandsaw, a thicknesser, the CNC that ran the Convoy bases) was sold to other Sydney makers through the Australian Woodwork forums. Some of those tools are still running today, in other workshops, on other projects. That is the quiet good outcome of a brand winding down well: nothing wasted, no fixed assets sitting in a storage unit gathering dust.