Our Story

Hi, I'm Kurtis.

I worked in corporate IT for years. Then my job got shipped overseas. I found another one, and a while later that one went the same way. I found a third, and it went too. After that I spent close to two years applying for things and mostly hearing nothing back. If you've been through a stretch like that you know what it does to a person. Eventually I stopped refreshing job boards and decided I'd build something of my own instead of waiting for permission to work.

Bush & Briar is my third try. Before this there was a coffee company, and a pet supply store before that. I cared about both of them. They just didn't work, and I still couldn't give you a clean answer as to why. I've got theories. Most of them come down to learning things the expensive way.

What never changed through any of it is what I like and don't like in the things I own. I can't stand synthetic junk. Plastic-fiber clothing that pills after a few washes. Particle board furniture that swells up the first time something spills on it. Things that cost more than they should and fall apart faster than they should. I want objects made out of materials that actually grew somewhere, worked by somebody who knew what they were doing, instead of pressed out of a mold by the thousand.

That's the whole idea here. Natural materials, made by hand, by people who know the craft.

I look for that here first. American-made is the first thing I search for, every time, and when I find something that fits I buy it without thinking twice. It just doesn't turn up often. The crafts this shop is built on mostly stopped being practiced in this country generations ago. They survived in the places where nobody got around to replacing the person with a machine, and that's where I've had to go to find them.

I know how that sounds coming from a guy whose job went overseas. I've thought about it more than you'd expect. What I keep landing on is that where something gets made was never really the issue. It's whether anybody actually made it, or whether it just came out of a process. A person spending three weeks coiling a basket by hand is the opposite of the thing that took my job.

Everything I sell, I buy outright. It comes to my house here in Orange County, I open every box and look at every piece, and when you order I pack it and take it out myself. There's no warehouse anywhere in this. It's me and a stack of cartons in the garage.

Right now that means baskets. It will mean more than baskets eventually, but I'm only adding things I can actually stand behind, and finding those takes a while.

I'm working nights at a restaurant while I get this off the ground. That's the honest current situation. The plan is to do this full time, and I'm not going to dress it up as further along than it is.

One practical thing before you buy anything. Everything is made by hand, so nothing is identical. Sizes come out a little different, patterns don't repeat, colors shift between batches. That's not a defect, it's just what handmade looks like, and I want to say so up front rather than have you open the box surprised.

Thanks for reading all that. If you email with a question, it's me answering.

Kurtis
Bush & Briar 🌿