Will McCallum and George Wilkins weren’t having much luck at outdoor craft marketplaces. They liked the items they’d been designing since their university days, and so did their friends, but sales were “meh.” So they went online, and lo and behold, they were suddenly where they’d aspired to be: in the global market.

From the start, the friends—who first met at ages 12 and 13—designed simple, functional items. “With most of our products, we thought, ‘That would be cool—I’d quite like to own one of those myself,’” says McCallum. The roster included furniture, lamps, duffel bags, an indoor swing, and a wall-mounted roller to dispense kraft paper ideal for to-do lists, menu plans, or doodles against the kitchen wall. Along the way, the paper roller really took off—it’s still their bestseller—and the pair realized if they truly wanted to make it big internationally, they’d need to focus on similarly useful, easy-to-ship items. They tailored their product line and adopted the motto “Making everyday tools great again” to describe the hip, minimalist sign and display systems that have become their specialty.

Not that the 20-something-year-old entrepreneurs have abandoned fun as a principle for their products. This is a company, after all, where a game of “rock, paper, scissors” has decided everything from which partner gets marquee billing in the business name to which team member makes the day’s tea. George & Willy still sell “just what we like” items, including a fire starter, a pulley-system clothes drying rack, and merino wool socks—the latter a nod to their New Zealand roots, where merino sheep are plentiful. Only now, their market includes customers in more than 70 countries.

McCallum’s and Wilkin’s work spaces have undergone a similar evolution: from ad hoc to creatively outfitted, industrial warehouse. Back when they were still students at the University of Otago, they left the window of the school’s workshop building open, so they could sneak back after hours and work on their designs. After graduation, they used sheds at their parents’ houses until neighbors complained about the noise. Actual rentals followed, including, most recently, that of a warehouse in the coastal town of Mount Maunganui. After two and a half years, though, the cluttered space felt wrong. In April 2019, George & Willy decided to update. Now, the warehouse’s straightforward exterior—a large blue box with an oversize, sheet-metal garage door—belies the fun, youthful interior.

To remake the space, McCallum and Wilkins gave themselves three weeks and a shoestring budget of $5,000 to empty the warehouse, spray-paint the concrete walls and floors white, and build a meeting room in the sole windowed corner (and behind a sliding barn door). One wall area became a prototype construction area, another a packaging station, still another a kitchen. (In one cost-effective swoop, everything about the business now can occur under one roof except for the manufacturing, which takes place in China and the United States as well as New Zealand.) “We used to have so much junk in here,” McCallum muses, but the new, tight organization means now things are “soothing—kind of like a library.”

The two partners and their four team members do their desk work in one of four “productivity huts,” or tiny gabled structures. “When you have a desk in the middle of a big space, you don’t feel very cozy,” says McCallum. “It’s nice to have a little cave where you can go in. It’s more in proportion to the size of the body.” Adds Wilkins, “I used to feel bad employing people, when they were working at a poky little desk out back. Now, it’s an enjoyable space for everyone to be in everyday.” The huts also help define the warehouse’s interior, as do low plywood shelves and plants in plywood planters. Crucially, they can be moved for the photoshoots that are so important to the brand, since George & Willy remains an online business with no brick-and-mortar stores.

Now the warehouse, says McCallum, “is a start-to-finish full service playground for what we do.” All the more so given the space’s ample use of George & Willy products. One of their round signs announces the business outside, their peg board shelving system outfits the kitchen, and the aforementioned mounted roller hangs kraft paper used for shopping lists. Other clever signage featuring playful magnet letters or green chalkboard slats displays things like monthly goals, the company’s mission, upcoming blog post assignments, and motivational quotes (a choice snippet from Dr. Seuss reminds everyone, “Today you are you, that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is you-er than you.”)

Other features encourage recreation and relaxation. One of the first products George & Willy made—a wooden swing—hangs from the 16-foot-high ceiling. One nook holds an archery target; another displays a Polaroid grid of family and friends as well as an employee’s white motorcycle. A dinner bell of native New Zealand totara and blackened steel in the kitchen gathers everyone for communal morning tea or lunch. “Otherwise,” says McCallum, “no one stops working.”

Project Credits:

Builder: George & Willy / @georgeandwilly

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