icepick's blog

I can personally promise you this event will be awesome. You should be there.

In the summer of 2011, the three of us in the office were each given a Klean Kanteen pint "glass" at a gathering. Since then, the cup has become something I use on a daily basis. We approached the folks at Klean Kanteen about making a cup for PDW, and they were into it. Today, 250 of them showed up. Lots of those have already sold. If you are looking for a new favorite cup, look no further.

Sure you do. Tell you what, come to this event and I promise you fun. How does that sound? Oh, it sounds awesome? Of course it does.

From our family to yours.

One of the most important things about designing your own products is to always keep learning more about design. We're always looking at the way we use other products, the way things look out of context, they way things have been done before. To that end, I'm always interested in documentary films about designers. Last Friday my wife and I went to the Clinton Street Theater here in SE Portland and watched "The Architect and the Painter," a film about Ray and Charles Eames.

Growing up in Michigan, there was always an Eames influence around especially in office furniture, so I was fairly familiar with their work already. The film was really great, and drew quite a bit more of their personal lives that I didn't know much about into perspective. I was thinking about posting something about the doc, but hadn't gotten around to it. Today, Twitter was abuzz with a new video with a very different take on the Eames from of all people Ice Cube.

Amazing!

We've been pretty lucky in the Pacific Northwest this December with some dry, sunny weather. Sensing it might not last, I did some camping/fishing/fire building with some pals up on the Cispus River in Washington over the weekend. The sun went behind the ridge to the south of us pretty early in the day, like around 3. Made for a LONG night. I snapped this picture with some of the last light. I do love the simple things sometimes.

Bicycle Lights by PDW from PDW on Vimeo.

Our buddy Kyle at 21st Ave Bikes here in Portland tipped us to this video last week. I've watched it about 20 times. Pretty much captures the vibe I think. Keep it simple, and have fun out there.

Lars N Bars gets Klunking from Transition Bikes on Vimeo.

2011 has been a busy year for PDW. Most of the year we've been working on growing the brand to shops all across the USA and around the world. One of our main goals has been bringing our inventory up to the level where we've got at least a few units of all of our products in stock at all time. That has been a tall order but 3 years in things are going pretty well. That said, we're still working on several new products that will be showing up in shops in the next few months. One of the items we've been hearing feedback on for a few years is black leather grips. Well fear not, they are coming! In the spring of 2012 there will be black and antique brown leather grips, and we're getting close to at least one new color of speed metal grips. Here is a sneek peak.

Since we acquired the PDW Mothership building in the summer of 2010, we've slowly been doing repairs. We've covered some of those repairs in previous entries. So far most of the work has been going on inside, but this last week we've made some real progress on the exterior of the building.

Just yesterday, our new entryway was completed. Gone is the faded, broken wooden facade. In its place is a steel-plated wall with a stainless steel PDW logo and address. As the steel plates oxidize, the contrast between them and the sign and concrete will look pretty sweet. The awesome work was done by the talented (and very fast) Todd Littlehales with some help from PDW pal Tony Batcheller of Tonic Fab.

The City of Portland inspector seems to think the new look is a bit too "Po-Mo for No-Po" and would look better on a building in the Pearl District, but we're really, really happy with how it turned out. The building looks great now, especially with four bike parking staples out front.

Earlier this week when we had some sun, Heidi Schultz finished the mural on the West side of the building that faces Williams. The bicycle likenesses are based on work by our old friend Leah Stargardter and appeared on some of our original packaging. If you are rolling North on Williams, you can't miss em.