On a trip to London last month I wandered into a super-specialty store that sells handmade shotguns and rifles that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Each.
(Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post) - A stack of rebound books are pictured. Distinctive Bookbinding is a small company that does very specialized work with books and leather goods, such as labeling, repair and inscriptions. It is a very rare, old craft that few people perform.
More business news
Google faces new FTC probe over display ads
Federal officials have monitored firm’s conduct since its acquisition of digital ad company DoubleClick.
Chrysler, Tesla spar over repayment of federal loans
Tesla said it was the first U.S. automaker to fully pay. But Chrysler said it was. No way, Tesla replied.
Md. firm settles civil charges on leaked data
The SEC says worker at Institutional Shareholder Services revealed how clients were voting on corporate ballots.
The store is James Purdey & Sons. The Purdeys cashed out decades ago, and the store is now owned by a holding company specializing in luxury goods. Purdey is the gun of choice for purists who like to bag their grouse or buck in high style. Pick your analogy: It’s the Steinway or Rolls-Royce of the hunting set. Artisinal guns.
A Purdey salesman, obviously in love with his work, gave me a glimpse behind the business. Purdey, for example, scribbles details of every sale — model, barrel size, and other stuff like that — into fat books that list every weapon the store has sold since it opened in 1814.
Purdey sells about 60 rifles and shotguns a year, so the staff has lots of time to document each sale. The guns are handcrafted by 25 specialists in a London factory. They take two years to make. The current price, as best I could make out based on the currency exchange, is about $150,000 per gun. The case alone (including its canvas cover) is $6,000. Most are sold to U.S. buyers, although some gazillionaires will walk in off the street and buy a Purdey with a credit card.
So what’s this got to do with Washington?
Purdey made me think of Rockville’s Distinctive Bookbinding & Leather Designs, one of those super-speciality businesses that employs craftsmen who practice a lost art. I am taken as much with the romantic, feel-good nature of such stores as I am the unsentimental, bottom-line discipline that allows them to survive.
Distinctive — like Purdey — has found a way to stay alive, and indeed flourish. Its loyal clientele returns year after year for Bible rehabs, customized calendar books, photo albums, bookmarks, desk sets and whatever else.
The driver is big clients such as corporations, celebrities, embassies, government agencies and plain folk like me. I spent $38 at Distinctive recently to have my name engraved on a leather overnight bag. That must be less than what Sean Combs spent for a seven-piece, white leather desk set.
Want to give out hundreds of leather copies of “Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations”? One New York City bank did — for $300,000. Want an ostrich-covered iPad cover? How about an alligator-skin desk set? The company even has London connections. It sells fancy leather “table planners” through Fortnum & Mason, London’s 400-year-old version of Balducci’s Food Lover’s Market. It once created family heirlooms from the shoe collection of a recently deceased mother.
I remember Distinctive when it had offices in downtown Washington, near Connecticut and M. Those closed several years ago. When I needed something embossed, I went pecking around on the Internet to find them. I got a call from the owner, Sarah Larson.
The company still has an office in D.C., which can be accessed only by appointment. It also has a showroom at its studio in Rockville. (She hopes one day to open a boutique in Manhattan.) Larson, 44, has owned the company for eight years. She is an ambitious, no-nonsense entrepreneur. She is, as one colleague of mine puts it, an “IC:” someone who “instills confidence.”
Loading...
Comments