New Website Launched Today

A Black woman wearing a denim shirt is carrying a bicycle down a set of stairs in an urban environment. The bicycle has a green paint job and honey leather wrapped handlebars.

Original, unique designs to help with lifting and carrying your bicycle

Lifetime leather bar wraps in five styles for every type of handlebar and bicycle

A woman bicycling on a bright summer day over a green lawn wearing suede fringe cowgirl boots and with a 6-pack of Anchor Steam beer connected to the top tube of her bicycle with a honey leather 6-pack frame cinch

Best-selling "commuter essentials" for making the daily commute easier

A dark brown leather round, barrel-shaped saddle bag with cedar wood sides mounted to the back of a brown leather Brooks saddle on a cream-and-brown painted bicycle

Stunning handcrafted bicycle bags carry the essentials and turn heads!

Two people playing a game of travel cribbage on a wooden picnic table with a small leather and birch cribbage board

Our original best-selling Travel Cribbage Boards have fans worldwide

Two sets of travel dice on a dark brown leather table surface. Both sets show six dice coming out of a square brass tube. The dice are 7mm, smaller than standard. One has white dice and the other has black dice.

Play dice anywhere you go in a handcrafted brass keychain or necklace.

Two people playing dominoes using small, domino-sized playing cards on a walnut wood table with snacks and drinks. The domino cards are double 12 with different colors for each number and hand-drawn.

Uniquely functional for travel: hand-drawn domino playing cards (2 sizes!)

Close-up of a folding leather travel backgammon board mid-play on a weathered wood surface. A hand is reaching in and moving four game pieces (which are brass nails) between triangles, which are laser-engraved in the honey dyed leather. Accessories are visible, dice and doubling cube and peg storage

Our newest folding leather board and favorite game: Travel Backgammon!

A variety of handcrafted leather and wood handles on a sample board as seen from above and an angle

Leather handles in 8 styles, 4 leather colors, and 3 metal finishes

A white chest of drawers in a white and lilac baby nursery with three colors of leather Morrison bin pull handles, in Honey, Dark Brown, and Black

Strong yet soft, durable and sustainable, no-bumps and no-bruises

A white kitchen drawer under a gray countertop that has a natural tan colored leather handle with nickel hardware and an engraved label that says 'Silverware'

Add a label to handles and pulls for superior organization

Two cabinet doors swinging open towards each other with matching leather Lovejoy loop handles. The leather touches so the cabinets don't crash into each other, a solution for problem corners in kitchen design planning

Flexible but sturdy, creative solutions to tricky problem corners

A roll of natural leather on a white background

We wrote a free educational series about our favorite material, delivered to your inbox.

Valerie and Geoff from Walnut Studiolo are standing on a pile of driftwood between two boulders on the North Oregon Coast beach near Manzanita, with mountains and grey sky in the background

About Us

A long dark brown leather blueprint tube is shown on a long countertop being hand stitched together by Geoff, whose stitching hands are in the background

More Information

Valerie and Geoff Franklin of Walnut Studiolo standing behind their bicycles on a grassy green lawn. Geoff is doffing his hat to Valerie and she is smiling, as a gesture of service.

Customer Service

Our blog "In a Nutshell" is chock-a-block with fresh and intriguing content written by in-house humans!

by admin
May 17, 2022
2 min read

It's been months in the works! We completely re-designed our website, walnutstudiolo.com from top to bottom (a project managed totally in-house). In this post, we'll talk through what we did, and why.

Our new website is more than just a theme update. We used the opportunity to modernize our site, improve our content, and harmonize our branding:

We moved our website to a brand new theme, the Flex theme by Out of the Sandbox, to take advantage of new Shopify Online Store 2.0 features. (We've used the Turbo theme by Out of the Sandbox since 2017).
Our tagline is "Original Modern Designs", and we wanted to emphasize both our originality through artistic, hand-drawn touches, and our modern, clean design aesthetic in website fonts and colors.
We intentionally shared more of our personal story, putting pictures of ourselves and our hands and our handwriting front-and-center, to emphasize the personal nature of running a family business.

Homepage content has been completely revamped, to tell our entire story as concisely as possible: what we make, what it's made from, what people think about it, how we make it, and who we are.
We've added Wordpress blog functionality, so all blog posts are now searchable, hosted, and synced on our website in addition to the blog.
Speed, speed, speed. Our long-time theme got bogged down by all sorts of apps, glitches, and bugs after five years. New apps and new technologies require regular updating to stay relevant.
The color theme has been simplified and more contrastful, juxtaposing our signature "dark brown leather color" against a clean white background, occasional shading of a fine light gray, and a light blue accent color from our history: the background of the 2012 Jim Golden art poster.

*The Jim Golden Art Poster with light blue backgroun d , circa 2013*

The new font, simplified color scheme, and gradual introduction of handwriting across all our printed material will be a slow re-branding for a small business. As time goes by, we'll be replacing all of our printed collateral with new updated branding versions, but -- true to our commitment to sustainability -- we won't be wasteful: the old designs will continue to be used until they run out.
Next: we'll be improving our product listings and information pages with new Online Store 2.0 functionality metadata fields and customizable page templates.