Portland, OR · Est. 2009 · Home & Office
Grovemade
Desk goods made from real materials, built to outlast trends
Their story
Most desk accessories are designed to look good in a product photo and forgotten the week after you buy them. Grovemade makes the other kind.
Founded in Portland in 2009, Grovemade started with walnut iPhone cases — a signal, in retrospect, of everything they were about. Real material. Actual craftsmanship. A product that aged better than the phone it protected. When the iPhone changed, Grovemade kept making the same thing with the same rigor, just for desks.
Today they make walnut pen cups, leather desk pads, monitor stands, and phone docks. Every piece is designed to work together as a desk system. Every piece is made by hand in their Portland workshop. The walnut is sourced, dried, and milled by their team. The leather is cut and finished by their team. The tolerances are exact not because a spec sheet requires them to be, but because the people making these things care about how they fit together.
They have a team of designers, woodworkers, and leather workers in Portland. Not a factory overseas, not a drop-shipper with a logo on the box. A workshop, a team, and a standard.
Their products live on desks for years. That’s the whole point. You buy a Grovemade pen cup and it’s still on your desk when your company has changed, your computer has changed, and you’ve moved offices twice.
Why Obvious loves them
Max, one of our team members, has a Grovemade keyboard tray that’s followed him through three offices. That’s not an accident — it’s a design decision. Grovemade builds things with the intention that they’ll outlast the context they were bought in.
There’s something we find genuinely admirable about a company that has been making the same thing, better, for fifteen years. No pivots, no product sprawl. Just increasingly good desk objects. We want to help them spend less time on operations and more time on the craft.
Why their story inspired us
Most desk accessories are designed to look good in a product photo and forgotten the week after you buy them. Grovemade makes the other kind.
Founded in Portland in 2009, Grovemade started with walnut iPhone cases — a signal, in retrospect, of everything they were about. Real material. Actual craftsmanship. A product that aged better than the phone it protected. When the iPhone changed, Grovemade kept making the same thing with the same rigor, just for desks.
Today they make walnut pen cups, leather desk pads, monitor stands, and phone docks. Every piece is designed to work together as a desk system. Every piece is made by hand in their Portland workshop. The walnut is sourced, dried, and milled by their team. The leather is cut and finished by their team. The tolerances are exact not because a spec sheet requires them to be, but because the people making these things care about how they fit together.
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