Principles

Daggerfish is a micro-business built on a set of principles of good design and honest business practices. These principles guide not only the products I make, but also the way I interact with you and what you can expect from me.

Being principled means that I strive to balance the best interests of me and my customers, the environmental impact of my products, and the need to profit in order to survive and grow.

If these principles resonate with you, I hope you'll stay connected with Daggerfish on my email list or blog. More than that, I hope knowing how and why I've made these products will help you enjoy them even more.

-Adam

Daggerfish products work as promised, emphasizing function over fashion. They do what they say on the tin, with the least amount of hassle. As William Morris said, "Nothing useless can be truly beautiful," and there's no point in an uncomfortable chair.

While they are designed to be beautiful and crafted to a high standard of quality, these aren't just sculptural or art objects; they're tools meant to be used.

Nothing should be more complicated than it needs to be. Complexity leads to fragility, which creates failure points, hazards, and waste. Complexity also artificially inflates prices, paying for features that add to manufacturing costs but don't improve experience. Daggerfish products favor simple, low-tech solutions, and these constraints produce better designs.

Daggerfish products are designed for years of use, and Guaranteed For a Lifetime. Products are designed to work reliably forever, and to be easily repaired if they fail. I avoid using fragile materials and components with known failure points (like zippers) that render entire products useless when they break, and which cannot be repaired without significant time and skill. Importantly, products are never designed with planned obsolescence.

Daggerfish products are designed to last a lifetime, but just a lifetime. The end of the life of a product is an important component of design, and designing things to last includes thinking how they become useable in a new form (biodegraded, recycled, deconstructed, etc.) when they're no longer wanted or needed.

As a micro-company, Daggerfish is sometimes limited in options for deconstructable materials, but I'll privilege them whenever I can. There's already enough stuff on planet Earth, and no reason for anything new we make not to be deconstructable.

Materials drawn from nature connect and integrate us with our natural surroundings, rather than insulate and isolate us from it. I work to minimize or eliminate the presence of inorganic materials like plastic & polyester in my products, in favor of wood, cotton, metal, leather, etc.

Daggerfish is a response to outdoor gear, styles, and trends that take us out of the wilderness rather than making us feel a part of it. It not only feels better to use something made from natural materials - advances in manufacturing technologies push the boundaries of how well these traditional materials can perform.

Wilderness exploration offers us a chance to gain a wide variety of skills, and Daggerfish products are designed to help you learn and develop these skills. But it's important to note that (for most people) the reason to practice wilderness skills is not because you're going to need them to survive. Instead, it's to enhance your faith and confidence in yourself.

Learning how to do things instead of having them done for you makes you a participant in the experience, rather than an observer of it. To help you learn, I'll provide written and video guides to every product and be available to answer your questions. I trust in your ability to learn to use the things you buy, and that learning how to use a tool is part of the joy of having it.

I don't follow trends or release new colorways every year. There's no artificial exclusivity, no hyped-up stuff, no thousand-dollar jackets. I use high-quality materials and detailed craftsmanship, but also work to lower costs without sacrificing quality. Both you and I deserve a fair price, where you can get something that you'll value and enjoy for a lifetime, and I can live akin to a modestly successful dentist.

There's no reason to throw away good ideas just because they're old, but no reason to blindly stick to traditions either. Good design understands the solutions of the past, both in their ingenuity and their limitations.

Innovating on tradition draws on what came before, and integrates novel approaches, new manufacturing technology, and other opportunities to develop better solutions for the present and future.

Ultimately, I'd like to build everything you need for outdooring, but here's the catch - you probably already have a lot of that stuff. Asking you to replace something that is already good enough with something new that I've made creates waste. And besides, you might really like the stuff you already have.

Daggerfish products are designed to work with the stuff you already have as well as possible. My products are modular and cross-compatible, both inside and outside of the Daggerfish ecosystem. I'll continue to work to design things that will integrate with other industry-standard products you might already own, and you'll never have to buy more of my products than you want.

Daggerfish will always be a work-in-progress, and as a micro-company I can't survive without some concessions to reality. When exceptions have to be made, they'll be noted and mitigated as much as possible, and I'll actively pursue new and better solutions and technology.

There's probably nothing I can make that doesn't cause some impact on the environment, but impact-reduction is the pathway towards net-neutral manufacturing. Your purchases help me find and purchase from better businesses in my supply chain, strengthening those solutions and reducing the costs of more environmentally-friendly products. Together we can do better, even if it's not perfect, and work to support a more sustainable world of manufactured things.