About Thwap

Thwap is one person, one sewing machine, one Oakland apartment, and an alarming number of vintage neckties stored in colour-sorted shoeboxes. The brand makes handcrafted dog collars from pre-owned vintage men's ties. That's the whole business.

How it started

2018. A yard sale in West Oakland. A box of about 40 ties from someone's estate going for $5 for the whole box. I bought it because I couldn't bear to see them thrown away — most were silk, several were hand-painted, a few were obvious 1960s polyester. I took them home with no real plan.

A week later I was at the dog park with my dog, who was wearing a collar I'd made the night before from one of the ties. People asked about it. Three weeks after that, I made twelve more and posted them on Instagram. They sold in a day. By the end of 2018, I had a small business: regular hours sewing in the evenings, a routine of estate sales and thrift-shop trips on weekends, and a small but devoted Bay Area customer base.

Why "Thwap"

The name comes from the sound an old necktie makes when you flick it. Try it — slap one across your hand. Thwap. I needed a brand name and that was the first one that fit. It's the kind of name that doesn't sound like anything else, which makes search-engine ranking surprisingly easy when you do find the right people looking for you.

Where the ties come from

Three main sources, roughly equal share:

• Estate sales. The single best source for high-quality vintage ties. I subscribe to estate-sale notifications across the Bay Area and visit two or three a month. Estates of older men often include 20–50 ties accumulated over a lifetime.
• Thrift shops. Goodwill, Salvation Army, smaller independent thrift shops. Hit-or-miss but occasionally there are particularly good finds — hand-painted ties, silk ties from European fabric mills, ties with construction details that suggest they came from a custom tailor.
• Customer donations. Once you're in this business, people start sending you ties. Friends, family, customers cleaning out closets. I always pay something or trade for a collar when ties come in this way — feels right for what amounts to free inventory.

I do not buy new ties. The entire business model depends on giving second life to existing ties; buying new ones would defeat the point.

How a collar gets made

The process for each collar:

1. Cleaning — every tie gets cleaned before any cutting happens. Hand-wash for silk and wool, spot-clean for delicate or hand-painted ties. Some ties need a full overnight soak.
2. Inspection — checking for damage, fraying, or hidden stains that aren't visible on the outside. Bad ties get triaged into "fix and use" or "use for offcuts on custom orders".
3. Cutting — opening the tie carefully along its existing seam to flat-spread the fabric. The widest part of the tie becomes the collar face; the narrower parts become the buckle straps.
4. Fleece backing — fleece pieces cut to match, sewn together with the tie face right-side-out.
5. Hardware installation — buckle and D-ring stitched on with reinforced rectangular stitching.
6. Final inspection and photography — every collar gets photographed for the website before it's listed.

Total time per collar: roughly 90–120 minutes, depending on the tie's complexity and condition.

Why dog collars (and not, say, scarves)

People ask this. The honest answer is that I have a dog, the dog needs a collar, and the format of a tie maps neatly onto a collar in a way it doesn't quite map onto a scarf or a bow tie. Also: dog collars are a small enough format that one tie typically makes one collar, which means each piece is genuinely one-of-a-kind. That's been a useful constraint on the business.

The Oakland apartment

The studio is the second bedroom of my apartment. There's a heavy-duty industrial sewing machine in one corner, a long cutting table along the wall, three full bookshelves of shoeboxes sorted by colour and pattern, and the dog's bed in the other corner. The dog supervises.

What I don't do

• Wholesale. Several Bay Area pet shops have asked. The volume doesn't work — every collar is one-of-a-kind, which means I can't stock a retailer with consistent inventory.
• Cat collars. Cats need breakaway collars (safety) — different construction, different liability surface. Not in my skill range.
• Bandanas. The dog-bandana market is well-served by other makers; doesn't make sense for me to compete.

Get in touch

Email [email protected] — for sizing, custom commissions, or just to share a photo of your dog in their Thwap collar. The Instagram @thwap_thwap is where new collars first appear; following there is the best way to see new pieces before they sell out.