Andy was cutting his grass on a Saturday morning when frequent House co-conspirator Brian Awitan called. Not that Andy particularly likes to talk business on weekend mornings, especially with the fast-talking Awitan, but it sure beat doing yard work. Unsurprisingly, Brian needed a favor. His friends Tony Patella and Pete Searson had mashed their last names together to form a new denim company called Tellason and they needed a logo. Brian explained that Pete and Tony planned to make their signature jeans out of the best raw materials: North Carolina Cone Mills White board-stiff indigo-bleeding blue selvage denim and thick leather patches from Portland-based Tanner Goods. They also hired the best San Francisco stitchers to sew those bits together, steeping their new brand in the denim heritage invented in that very same city over 150 years before.

At the same time, we were starting to digitize some of the 10,000-odd film alphabets from our Photo-Lettering collection. One of our selections was a bulbously slabbed serif that immediately recalled wood-type printed rodeo posters, sales notices for gold-mining claims and wagon train departure announcements The name didn’t hurt either—type legend Ed Benguiat, who drew the original alphabet in the 1960s during his tenure as the art director for Photo-Lettering, Inc., awarded it the Wild West-evoking moniker “Buffalo.” Andy had an early version of the digital Buffalo font on his computer, so he took a break from cutting his grass and used the new font to create the Tellason logo. Tanner Goods then brought the new mark home by stamping it into the thick piece of leather that became Tellason’s trademark back patch.

Tanner Goods is also an American manufacturing success story. They make all of their leather goods in a Portland, Oregon factory, locally source all of their raw materials and are a general hub for creative innovation and sustainable business practices. We like anyone who can make deep impressions with our type and artwork, so we started to sweat Tanner Goods to manufacture some House Industries gear.

Just like when Andy gets distracted when he’s cutting his grass, our projects and partnerships rarely follow a straight line. It’s a good thing they don’t—as we zig zag through our process, the finished product isn’t as exciting as the things we learn and the people we meet along the way.