From Skidmore’s
In October 2012, Jan Halliday profiled Vince and Susan for The Leader, the Port Townsend and Jefferson County newspaper. The column ran on October 16 under the headline “What’s in Store: Beeswax creates a honey of a business.” This is our recap, kept with the workshop. The sentences in quotation marks are theirs, from that column.
In 1982 Vince had a new pair of beater cowboy boots and wanted a cream that would protect them. He melted beeswax from the family hives with oils in a double boiler, whipped the mix with a hand-cranked eggbeater, and rubbed it into the leather. He says the idea “came from the universe.” The boots came out shiny and waterproof, and the cream smelled like honey.
Friends bought jars. A neighbor who made chaps and saddles drove Vince, and cowboy poet Vern Benfer, to the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada. Vern owned Calabasas Saddlery near Malibu, a tack shop that had become a stop for riders, trainers, and people buying ranches on the edge of Los Angeles, and out in Colorado, Montana, and Wyoming. That shop was the first account. Vince remembers the cowboy wave of those years as Dances with Wolves and Lonesome Dove.
The cream stayed a sideline. Until the mid-2000s, Vince’s work was staircases, entryways, and mantels in large houses, plus furniture he designed himself. The trade started in childhood, in his parents’ antique business. In the 1960s they drove a U-Haul along Midwestern back roads, trading cash for furniture farms no longer wanted. He learned styles, joinery, and millwork by restoring those pieces, stripping lacquers with solvents and spraying new finishes. “By my 20s, I was toxic,” he says.
Traveling with his mother, he met people who still built to old proportions, and furniture made by hand in the early 1800s that was still sound. In California those same years were seed saving, gardens, canning, and communes. He calls that turn becoming “earth boy.”
The boot cream was the click. If it could protect leather and leave rawhide and linen stitching alone, it could stand in for the finishes that had made him sick. “Who would have thought there would be this huge hole in the world for this product?” The wood refinisher that grew from that question sold mostly in 5-gallon cans.
After Los Angeles, the Skidmores spent 22 years in Laramie, Wyoming. Then they wanted to be on the water. They make the products in a small shop in the Port of Port Townsend industrial park. Compacted honeycomb sits in the corner. Three tanks, built from junkyard parts and old water heaters, warm the wax and food-grade linseed oil with radiant heat. The room smells like honey. The products are not flammable, and they do not spontaneously combust.
Vince and Susan batch, fill, and label every jar and can themselves. One formula wears different labels. The biker line is its own market: Leather Cream Biker Edition and Beeswax Waterproofing Biker Edition. Susan told the paper, “Bikers don’t want to buy cowboy stuff, cowboys don’t want biker stuff, but when you have a cowboy who rides a bike, they buy a can for the barn and one for the garage.”
Customers then included international saddleries, small tack stores, and department stores. Nordstrom carried the product in 19 stores. Asked whether they would hire a sales staff and build an assembly line, Vince said no. They had a young daughter, they wanted a sane life, and they believed small workshops were how a place keeps its values.
Originally published October 16, 2012, in The Leader. Column by Jan Halliday.
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