Friday night we had the opening for “Hoi bo + Mjolk: A perspective on travel”. We set up the front half of our showroom with a Hoi Bo popup shop to showcase Hoi Bo’s beautiful collection. The night also fell on the same night as the Junction “Show Off” event, which we couldn’t participate in because of our scaffolding in front of the building.

Waxed cotton tool rolls for wrapping up toiletries and having a place to set your items on instead of placing them on the bathroom counter. The leather cases are all hand formed, and the closures were custom made and designed by Sarra.

To bring more of Hoi Bo’s studio to our shop, they brought their fern. We secretly want to keep it because it looks so good in the front space.

Bags lined up on the white risers.

A custom dress, bag, and necklace by Hoi Bo.

We served a collection of Quebec cheeses from the Junction Fromagerie with pumkin seeds, cranberries, and grapes.

Our three Thor Bjorklund knives.

Custom leather wrapped apothecary jars for pills, or balms.

The first bag when you enter is the black leather on grey canvas travel bag.

Although we only took photos in the beginning and it doesn’t look like that many people came, it really got packed after an hour of being open. We had a bunch of apple cider and Perrier and it along with the cheese was demolished by 9:00.

Part of the exhibition will continue this week, we hope to see you in the shop! Of course, the travel bag will be here longer.

During our most recent trip, a lot of you noticed the new bag I was wearing. We were both really happy that people noticed, the bag is actually a prototype travel bag that was a collaboration between maker Sarra Tang (HOI BO), and Mjölk. We took it with us for a crash test in Japan, catching different trains every day, spending a new day in a different city, and only using one day trip bag everywhere we went.

The collaboration started after Juli purchased a HOI BO bag for herself, and we posted it on our blog. Sarra saw it and came over to the shop and bought one of our Eve bracelets by Claesson Koivisto Rune. Later they got together over dinner with a mutual friend and after finding a lot of similarities in sensibility a collaboration started to make a lot of sense. After visits to the studio, and bites at the Drake the essence of the bag started to take shape. For all of us the resulting bag had to reflect the shared belief of a perfect balance between form and function.

For Sarra the real challenge was to design a toiletry case and bag that could be used for a man and woman. Not create a genderless bag, but a bag that complimented each gender in a different way.

Specifications:

All bags and leather work are exclusively made at the HOI BO studio in the Historic Distillery District

Fabric : Waxed canvas, 100% Cotton.  Made in the US since 1847
The fiber is both water and soil repellent

Leather : Naked bark tanned leather.  Tanned in the US since 1881

Hardware : Solid Brass

Also features a black leather cover for cellphone pouch.

To compliment the bag a pair of two leather toiletry case were made and designed by Sarra. There is no machine work used on the leather case, they are entirely sewn and fabricated by hand using natural tanned leather. The brass details are all designed and cast by HOI BO.

We felt it was really important to share with you Sarra Tang’s studio space to get a feel of where and how these pieces are all made. The space is located in the Distillery and open to the public, you can also buy her work in the studio.

One of the first things I noticed in the store, besides the beautiful partially finished beeswax bags hanging in the ceiling, was the custom made plywood clothes hangers with a layer of natural leather stamped with “HOI BO”, they even had a sand cast brass hanger. That level of thoughtfulness in her space was something I instantly admired and connected with.

Partially finished beeswaxed bags hang from the ceiling, interestingly enough they look like beehives hanging from the white painted ceiling.

Natural blocks of beeswax.

With a team of three makers, all of HOI BO’s work is hand crafted in-house with deep consideration for both quality and innovation of process. Their satchels are created in production runs of 4-6 pieces allowing them to focus intimately on every detail.

A collection of leather accessories with the ubiquitous tomato pin cushion.

A brief shot of the work desk.

Coming full circle back to the bag, we’re going to be having a launch party on October 21st, where you will be able to purchase the bag. We will only have a limited amount available since the production runs are small in order to keep a high standard of quality.

The bag can be worn three different ways, as a backpack, shoulder bag, and messenger bag. You can also remove all of the straps to create a beautiful brief case. Above you can see the bag in a couple different uses.

We hope to see you at the event!

After being featured in Dwell we thought it would be fun to re-introduce ourselves. We’ve met a lot of new people in the store and one thing we heard over and over was that the photos they saw didn’t really reflect the true scale of the store, or the range of work we sell.

We thought this would be a great time to share some updated photos, and also share a more in depth experience of the new online store.

A new shot of the front half of the store, the white risers are lined in one row showcasing more of our artisan products.

New coffee scoops by Japanese artist Tomiyama Koichi, soon to be added to the online store.

A photo of our store’s functioning kitchen, complete with a teak counter top and blue Vola faucet by Arne Jacobsen. We empty this counter during events, it’s the perfect place to rest your drink.

The back of the showroom with our newest cabinetry addition, designed by Studio Junction. This is where we feature our more personal accessories including magnetic business card cases by Masakage Tanno, leather works by Kenton Sorensen, and our new perfume created by Comme Des Garcons for Artek.

The Japanese coffee light is by the same artist who makes the coffee scoops, it features a handmade walnut lamp shade.

Trinidad chairs and Hiroshima dining table in front of our oak and glass shoji inspired sliding door. Our furniture offerings are a bit sparse at the moment but all that will change by the end of the month when Fredericia and Asplund arrive!

So if you came to our shop and purchased something, you’d be taking it home in our little brown paper bags with a sticker enclosure.

We spent a lot of time thinking about how we could bring the experience of the brick and mortar shop to our online customers. We started with the idea of printing boxes, and came up with the idea of creating a wire cage milk bottle crate image on the box. Once we had the milk theme down it was easy, for the small box we would have a milk pitcher inspired by our favourite milk pitcher by Kaj Franck for Arabia, and the largest box we would have a large milk pail.

We took our initial ideas and mock ups and gave them to Sali Tabacchi to be refined. They took our simple drawings and took them to the next level, giving them life and movement, the upside down bottles, stacked milk pitchers, and the return address foil stamp – all their ideas.

So when ordering from us, how would we wrap up the following:

Kenton Sorensen passport wallet
Nendo Corona mini globe
Mjölk tea towel

The wallet we would wrap in some beautiful wax paper, we’re using this paper for our brushes, leather products, and small woodware.

The Corona globe comes in a simple box so we wrap it in some additional brown paper, tag it with our mjölk sticker and tie it with natural twine.

The tea towel is simply wrapped in white tissue paper and closed with a sticker.

Now if you’ve purchase from us before these boxes you might say “Hey! I just purchased from you guys and the packaging wasn’t this nice!” That might be true since if the box is really beautiful, or if the item is a hard shape to wrap we might have simply wrapped it in some simple tissue paper. Now that we have the new boxes we’re going to try our best to stick to this caliber of packaging, hopefully we’ll find even more inspiration during our next trip to Japan.

The stickers are designed to be both right side and upside down because we use them as a close on our store paper bags. We also include hand written notes with our orders on over sized business cards.

Ps. We re-use clean bubble wrap, packing peanuts and any other crazy materials to fill these boxes out. Reduce, reuse, recycle!