How did you get started in this?

Hi there, thanks for the question! You know if anyone had told me what I'd be doing for a living when I grew up, I wouldn’t have believed it. I wasn't one of the people you meet in BDSM circles who always knew they were tops or bottoms, and in many ways my interest in the lifestyle remains cultural rather than instinctive. So I wasn't driven by an all consuming passion to be a whipmaker…..

What happened was I moved from England to Canada in 1993. A couple of years later I met my partner, who at the time was a student, trying to make ends meet. She had been introduced to BDSM a year or two earlier, and was keen to experiment further. I had no idea what was about to hit me. She and a friend decided they wanted to make a whip. They were unhappy with the quality of the merchandise on display in our local mom n pop, and with the pricing of the real whips at Northbound Leather in Toronto, so they decided to just make their own. (This is typical of my partner; she fixes cars, rewires houses and once replaced the entire drain/waste venting system in our house). She's a bit of a perfectionist. Her first whip, however, was not great, to say the least. It was a five lash affair, with three part hair braiding which fell apart if looked at. The second was a bit better, the third, better yet. She moved away from lambskin and onto pigskin, which you can pull a bit harder and braid tighter. We'd also discovered the four lace round braid, and that was a major turning point.

The first time she asked me to use a whip on her, I had something of an emotional meltdown; I come from a family where my father regularly beat my mother, and have a lot of bad memories from back then. It took me a while to recognise the difference between that and what my partner was asking for; which was sensuality, not brutality. I began to understand SM play as a kind of psycho-physical art of sensation that's much broader and more subtle than the way it is typically represented in media. Easy to say now!

By the time I got the sack from my crappy job selling famous brand name coffeemakers and irons to hotels across North America, my partner was trying to operate a small mail order catalogue business and we had a little workshop in the basement of our house. The catalogue thing wasn't working, and I had been working in wholesale distribution, so we put our heads together (in a productive way), and decided to try and sell direct to stores. We had a repertoire of restraints, a couple of braided whips, a dill harness and some floggers, and with the help of the directory in the back of Screw the Roses, started calling fetish stores. Sometime in 1998, we loaded up an ancient KZ 400 motorcycle with samples and headed down to the States, to see the Leather Man and Purple Passion in NYC and Dressing for Pleasure in New Jersey. And we've been busy ever since!

That's how I got into it. Why floggers specifically, would be because that's where our main interest lies. My partner enjoys the sharp nasty pieces, light but stingy (especially our Nikita whip, which is the spiritual descendant of that first sad lambskin piece). I like to take her to those places, and in the right mood I like to go there myself. When we first started, though, I had no idea it would last this long. Business is kind of addictive, if only because you never get to the point where you're actually finished at the end of the day. The interest comes with acquiring knowledge; of perfecting techniques; of the recognising the properties of different types of leather and the potential sensations they can deliver. Over the years, we have made some pieces that I think are among the best SM tools ever, and the pride I take in that is a source of great satisfaction. I have to say I do have a pretty fabulous toybag! Unfortunately, due to the rigours of leatherwork, we no longer offer our more intensive braided work for wholesale, and my partner is no longer involved in working in the shop. I'm still at it every day, and though I get achy fingers (also wrists, elbows, shoulders, neck and back), I continue to get a buzz from a nicely finished pineapple knot. I absolutely love knotting!

I hope that answers your question. Hopefully you managed to stay awake till the end! I'll be happy to elaborate further on any aspect of the work (without revealing any registered trade secrets…), here's a couple of links to some of the flagellation tools we've made:

link

link

I keep posting on my partner's account by accident. I really need to remember to log back into my account...

The work involved in a good singletail is phenomenal. If you're making something like a (relatively simple) 16 lace singletail from kangaroo hide, you first of all have to cut the skin in a spiral, maybe 1/8" wide. (In a spiral because the roo skins aren't long enough to cut straight) Then you have to straighten the lace, by pulling, so you can braid it. Hard core whipmakers will bevel (take the square edges off) the lace with a knife, so the braids will lay in better. Then you have to taper the laces at specific points along the length, so you can drop from 16 laces to 4 at the tip, allowing the kinetic energy of the throw to move smoothly down the lash. Then you get to braid it, which involves pulling hard with the tips of your fingers, and maintaining an even tension all the way along what could be a six foot length. And most good singletails are made up of a bolster and overlay - in other words one whip braided over the top of another. That's why good whipmakers keep retiring!

Floggermaking is much easier on the body, primarily because it lends itself better to mechanisation. All of our floggers are die cut, and the braided pieces we are still making don't have tapered lashes, so we can cut them on the clickpress too. The other way to ease the wear on the body is to be aware of ergonomics, and to design methods of working that take the strain off you. We have actually built a couple of jigs for braiding handles; we still do the work, but the jig holds the piece and swivels so we can easily access all sides of it. It makes a difference. You're right though; working leather by hand can be completely brutal, and if for whatever reason you're not working ergonomically, it will cut your productive life pretty short, pretty quickly.

Thanks Gary
We actually did that a number of times, on various bikes from the 70s, went to Chicago on a 73 Honda 500 4, with personality problems, and snapped the clutch cable at Kalamazoo; Miami on a KZ650 coming back over the Smoky Mountains in a snowstorm; CD, Phillie, Boston (blew the headlight on the urban highway in the dark), New York and god knows where else. Mostly on a budget which consisted off 'drop off orders and get paid in cash'!

My partner Kristina passed her part one motorcycle test and two days later she was riding a seriously overloaded KZ400 around Manhattan.

Happy days!