Roosey Workshop

Julian caught a break when a furniture designer hired him as a workshop assistant despite a lack of fabrication experience. Being in a small studio, doing bespoke woodwork and upholstery with meticulous craftspeople, upped his expectations for the level of detail and finish quality for design items. He started doing leatherwork after hours and his friendship with the lead sewer helped me make the jump into bags and larger work. He did strictly custom pieces at first but in late 2018 (after cramming several hundred pounds of industrial equipment into his apartment) Julian started producing a line of goods as Roosey Workshop. Everything is hard-wearing and can be dressed up or down, and the work is kept approachable by Julian's low-key Queens upbringing and a pretty transparent intent to not grow out of early Julian's note about the name: I was living in Elmhurst with my partner Samantha when I first started working with leather. Our schedules were often staggered, with her being in grad school and me staying late at the shop. Roosevelt Avenue was where a lot of subway lines intersected on our way home, so we could give one another a heads up when we were passing through it and that would give a sense of how far away we were. Roosey, for short.