Danke für 10 Jahre treue!
Ten years of Pack & Smooch
Where did the time go? Packed away, probably, in all those tailored sleeves for iPhones, iPads and notebooks. We are glad you are here: without people like you there would be no Hamburg workshop.
It all starts with mum. And sheep and cattle.
We wanted to make something of our own, from genuinely good, durable materials. After a fair amount of tinkering the first product was born: the HAMPSHIRE laptop sleeve, in merino wool felt and vegetable-tanned Bavarian leather. Nothing came off a production line back then, but plenty came off mum's sewing machine.
First Hamburg, then Honolulu
We never imagined we would one day use the words „international expansion". But through Etsy the other side of the world waved over: orders from Hawaii, Australia and New Zealand, when you had never sold outside Germany before. We are a little proud to still be among the top ten German Etsy sellers.
Do you want to be rich, or still recognise yourself in the mirror?
2014 taught us a lesson at the IFA in Berlin. The „handcrafted" standard, the tailored Apple accessories and the combination of merino wool felt and leather made buyers from around the world curious. But we are unsuited to the mass market, because we are too good. We could not compete on price with poor quality from the Far East. So what? We stayed with our idea and have never regretted it.
Small but proper
What we liked most were the smaller local fairs. DesignGift in Hamburg or the St. Pauli Wintergarten were meet-ups where we got into real conversation with you. Talking across the counter and hearing what you want beats any market research.
After sleeves for iPhone, iPad and MacBook, accessories followed. In 2018 we brought a product into the world through a Kickstarter project for the first time: the TABSTRAP iPad holder. Today our range counts around 300 styles and variants, from a key ring to a leather camera patch.
Sustainability, that big word
Design
A sustainable, meaning durable and timeless, design is part of it for us. „There is a point where you are happy with a design, but the future keeps bringing new materials, trends and processes that make a design look dated fast. Perhaps that is why I favour plain, restrained forms."
Material
No appetite for the average was the credo from the start. That goes for our vegetable-tanned leather, which we source only from craft producers. And for the wool felt, almost a science of its own. We have always used 100 % merino wool; since 2018 a blend developed for us alone, and since 2019/2020 with mulesing-free wool.
Incidentally: in 2012 our sleeves were part of the Stylectrical exhibition at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg. „Fast Fashion" followed in 2015.
People
Forget the people over the products? Not a chance. As orders grew we found help through a Hamburg reintegration programme. That was the beginning of a collaboration that lasts to this day: from the programme, which ended in 2016, we were able to take on our seamstress Aneta.
Growth
Growing slowly and organically, out of our own means rather than with investor money, is part of the same thinking. Nobody has to arrive with a watering can of cash for us to thrive at our own pace. The move in 2016 into the former chocolate works in Hamburg-Wandsbek was exactly right: production, storage and office in one place.
