To be clear, you can appreciate Axe & Awl Leatherworks’ appealing lineup of leather goods even if you’re not the sort of person who up and runs into a burning building. But it doesn’t hurt the brand that many of its customers wouldn’t hesitate to do just that. In its inviting, exposed-brick showroom in downtown Waynesville, North Carolina, you’ll see all manner of leather items on display, most of them made in a workshop just across town: sleek totes with solid brass fasteners, sling-style cross-body bags, burly duffels, and guitar straps, to name just a few. But you’ll also probably spot an off-duty firefighter or two, browsing through first-responder gear along with the townies and tourists perusing belts and custom dog collars.
“I never pictured leaving the fire department, honestly,” says Spencer Tetrault, who cofounded Axe & Awl with his wife, Courtney. As a firefighter in nearby Asheville, he decided in 2014 to take up a hobby, so between shifts he began tinkering with making leather wallets, key chains, and phone cases, poring over books and online forums and quickly becoming smitten with the craft. “I was learning at the kitchen island,” he says. “I didn’t know how to sew, so all of it was brand-new to me.” Soon, a coworker asked if he could make him a belt. Other colleagues got wind of it, and he started fashioning on-the-job accessories for them—suspenders, glove straps, radio straps.
Word spread like, well, wildfire; workers at other stations started placing orders; and as the old song goes, from small things big things one day come. The Tetraults set up as a vendor at a few weekend fire colleges, which firefighters attend to keep their certifications fresh, then at big trade shows in Charlotte, Nashville, and Indianapolis, returning home with “more work than we could handle,” Spencer recalls. Traffic on their website picked up; orders snowballed. In late 2016, Courtney left her job as a paramedic to turn to leatherwork full-time, and a few years later, Spencer followed suit. In 2021, they renovated a building on Depot Street dating to the turn of the last century and moved their workshop from their basement to the shop’s back room and then, eventually, to a five-thousand-square-foot warehouse nearby. They also expanded beyond firefighter gear (sales of which are still going strong) to “bags, wallets, belts—things that everyday folks are shopping for,” Spencer says. The company, now with eleven employees, expects to see sales crest $1 million this year.
As Axe & Awl prospers, though, it’s also growing into something more than just a leather shop—it’s “a communal hub,” Spencer says, sending out roots deep into the fabric of Waynesville. There are the store’s homey touches: the shop cat, Ivy, presiding over the showroom; a 1920s Royal manual typewriter, nodding to one of the building’s past lives as a typewriter repair shop; framed vintage photos of the Waynesville Cafe, the space’s original occupant, and a horse-drawn cart from the Junaluska Tannery, hearkening back more than a century to the region’s leatherworking heritage. The Tetraults are converting the former workshop in the back into the Bevel Bar—named after a leatherworking tool that “takes the edge off,” Spencer explains—which will soon host Friday- and Saturday-night cocktail gatherings. And last year the company launched Haywood Heroes, a fundraiser named for the surrounding county, with live music on the closed-off street out front, to benefit worthy local causes: firefighters last year, naturally, and teachers and nurses on deck for the near future.
The Tetraults have other big dreams: more brick-and-mortar outlets, perhaps; maybe a pop-up in New York City. “We have the opportunity to become, like, a Filson,” Spencer says, evoking the esteemed Seattle-based maker of outdoor gear and clothing. “We make nearly all the leather goods we sell, except the boots. And that’s just not common anymore. It’s just us deciding how far we want to go.”
