Building climbing gear taught me how to make things strong. The years after gave me an indepth look at the domestic manufacturing supply chain from a new lens - and, eventually, showed me why I needed to build my own way. This is the part of the story that explains how the shop in Part 1 came to be: the one-person room, the rule against machines that cost, and the choice to develop high end gear my own way. It didn't come from theory. It came from doing the opposite first.
What came after Misty Mountain?
I’ve worked with a number of different brands, on a variety of design projects since my time at Misty. Two experiences that definitely helped level up my softgoods game would be my time spent with Josh, the owner of Tufa Climbing, in his studio in Montana, and later going to work for Triple Aught Design full time in their San Francisco office. 
I moved out to Montana after leaving Boone and quickly became friends with Josh. We climbed together and he was kind enough to open up his doors to me and let me assist with some really cool projects. Tufa is more or less a one man band - He is the owner, operator, designer, marketer and so on. I have a ton of respect for his commitment to the craft. It's amazing what he has been able to do and what he continues to accomplish with his business. This was probably the first time I really got to pull back the curtain and see what going out on your own and starting a brand can look like.
In 2018 Triple Aught brought me on as their Equipment Designer, based out of the San Francisco office in the dogpatch neighborhood. With TAD, I spent most of my time in the design lab / sample shop in the back of their warehouse in the AIC building. I worked with all of their suppliers, manufacturing partners and eventually led the efforts to stand up their own satellite manufacturing facility in NC in 2020. I was totally out there in the deep end, which is exactly where I wanted to be.
Wait, you actually helped build a factory?
Yessir. So… during Covid, all of our domestic manufacturing partners essentially transitioned to producing PPE overnight. So in 2020 I moved back to Western North Carolina to set up a factory for Triple Aught. I went and looked at a bunch of different sites, mostly old decaying factories along the i40 corridor, and wound up finding a great spot in Old Fort, NC. I was able to work with the local county and state folks on incentive packages for hiring, training, and the building upfit. We bought machines, laid out multiple assembly lines, hired sewers, and even taught them to run the equipment.
So why walk away from that?
My passion has always been design. I've never really been someone who likes telling other people what to do, and running a manufacturing floor is mostly that. Ultimately, I realized the trajectory I was on just wasn't mine to take, so in the spring of 2021, I made the difficult decision to move on and go out on my own doing freelance industrial design.
What's the work been since?
Some medical device work, a number of soft goods projects, and even some off-road armor for a boutique 4WD parts supplier. Freelance gave me something I hadn't had in a while — total freedom over my schedule, and the room to build things exactly the way I wanted, no boss, no assembly line to run. Just the floor plan in front of me and the choice of what to fill it with.
So why the small studio, when you’ve already worked on a larger scale?
Because I want to build something from the ground up, and do it my own way. I built the room in Part 1 to protect that. This is only the beginning for Thornhill. I’m building a product first company. One where I can design, prototype and test gear with rad folks and eventually offload the production and other aspects of the business that I’m not well suited for, to really great partners. It’s exciting to be here, transitioning from freelance to focusing more on this vision. As I like to say - put your shades on buddy, cause the future is bright!