Four machines, one oven, and a cutting table that used to be a school science bench. Everything sold here is made in one room in Redcliffe, about ten minutes' walk from Temple Meads.
Tumbletail began in 2019 because a rescue lurcher called Pim could get out of every collar sold in the shops near us. The first one that held was cut from a curtain, sewn on a borrowed machine in a back bedroom in Totterdown, and had a sliding bar salvaged from a rucksack strap. Four people at the park asked where it came from within a fortnight, which is a low bar for starting a business but it was the one we had.
By the end of that year there were two machines and a market stall on Saturdays. The unit in Bell Lane came in 2021, mostly because the biscuits had taken over the kitchen at home and something had to give.
Cotton arrives by the roll and goes straight into the washing machine — a domestic one, on a long 60° cycle, twice. That is the least glamorous part of the process and the most important: it takes the shrinkage out here rather than in your machine, and it is why a bandana that fits in October still fits in March.
Rolls are then cut on the table in stacks of twenty. Collars are sewn in one pass, box-stitched at both ends, and the hardware is fitted by hand — solid brass buckles and welded D-rings, no cast zinc, because a cast ring opens under a hard lunge and we have seen it happen. Bandanas are cut double, turned, topstitched, and pressed. A finished collar has been through six pairs of hands' worth of steps, though there are only three of us, so that is mostly the same hands several times.
Toys are made on Thursdays out of the week's offcuts. Nothing new is bought to stuff them; the bin under the cutting table is the raw material, which is also why no two are quite the same colour inside.
Biscuits are baked on Tuesdays and Fridays in a domestic double oven at the back of the unit, registered with Bristol City Council and inspected like any other food premises. Four ingredients a recipe, forty-eight biscuits a tray, and no preservative of any kind — which caps how far ahead we can bake and is the reason a flavour sometimes shows as unavailable for a week.
Apples come from the greengrocer on the corner, generally the bruised box they would otherwise compost. Pumpkin is seasonal and gets roasted and frozen in October to last until spring. Eggs are free-range from a farm outside Chew Magna.
For every order that leaves the studio we set aside a kilogram of dry food for one of three rescues: a lurcher rescue in Keynsham, a cat and kitten fosterer network in Easton, and a small pound-pull operation working out of Weston. We deliver it ourselves once a fortnight in a van that smells permanently of biscuits.
Since starting in 2021 that has come to just over four tonnes. We publish the running total on the sticker inside every box rather than making a banner of it, and none of the three has ever asked us to put their logo on anything, which suits everyone.
Three of us: one who cuts and sews, one who bakes and packs, and one who does the machines, the accounts and the van. We deliberately do not put names and photographs on the site — customers write to the studio, not to a person, and whoever opens the inbox that morning answers.
Anything that comes off the table with a crooked topstitch or a print that did not line up goes on the seconds shelf and is sold from the studio door on the last Saturday of the month, cash only, roughly half price. It is not listed online because there is usually only one of each. If you want to know when the shelf is worth a trip, the monthly letter says so.