Another amazing year in the books!
We saw a stronger then normal start to the year due to the carry over from the winter 2022 Wall Street Journal Off Duty Holiday Gift Guide. That is when many of our new followers joined us - welcome and thanks for sticking around!
A connection can't be undervalued - an old professor who now teaches Public Relations at Northern Michigan University reached out to see if we'd be interested in being the subject of his class case study! What an awesome opportunity it turned out to be. The class, broken into two groups, focused on different ways we could leverage and expand our current approach to things like social media, outreach, our website, content creation, and more.
This led to one of the students connecting us with the owners of Black Rocks Brewing in Marquette, MI. After speaking with them, we did a limited run of some awesome hatchets that they sold in house.
We launched a limited run of the Boreal camp knife in spring just in time for camping season! We hope to revive this project again in 2024!
We field a lot of question about which axe is best for chopping, camping, backpacking, splitting, etc. So we launched a quick and easy AXEessment. If you're unsure which tool to purchase take this super short quiz to find out.
Looking to add a heavy hitter to the lineup, we landed on a 5 lb. splitting maul. This addition, while only releasing a super small batch, was very well received and we plan to add it to the lineup later this January.
For a long while now there has been a void in our city that a new partner filled - welcome Expedition Detroit. Expedition Detroit researches, highlights and features every possible outdoor activity that is within a one hour drive of Detroit. We not only reply on their resources for our local hiking trails, but we designed a custom axe branded with them! You can find it on their site!
Working with new partners is always a fun part of the business - we find them and sometimes they find us! A shoutout to the below partners who now carry some of our axes and hatchet is store and online:
- Project Weekend in NY
- Axe & Arrow Trading Co. in TX
- GreenCove Collective in VA
We also added a few new sticker designs to the mix. Our 'MI Fire' and 'Axe & Relax' stickers can be purchased Here. There are meant to embody an outdoor focused, relaxed mindset. We may even turn these into t-shirts too!
The Michigan Department of Natural Resources (DNR) 'These Goods are Good for MI' Holiday Gift guide is always an honor to be included in. We spend a lot of time exploring and enjoying the beautiful parks around our state and it feels good to be able to give back. Our donations typically funnel towards new and existing trail maintenance.
To end the year we got 50 axes out for Nelson Tree Services as employee holiday gifts. These custom painted and branded axes symbolize the hard working efforts of their entire team!
While we hit some road blocks along the way, we plowed through making 2023 our best year yet.
In total we got almost 1,200 axes and hatchets out to our amazing customers. And we surpassed 3,500 lifetime tools. Our first year on Etsy, we sold 19 vintage tools - to see our passion project grow to this is incredible. Thanks to all who support what we do! Cheers to 2024!