Our story — Meet Simon
My grandfather Morris started a small timber workshop outside Manjimup in 1971. He made furniture mostly, a few shelving units for the local hardware on Giblett Street, some commission pieces for a couple of the bigger farms out toward Pemberton. My dad Ray took it over in 1994 and shifted the focus toward homewares, adding a small retail corner at the Albany Farmers Market on weekends. I grew up loading the ute on Friday afternoons and driving the 55 kilometres to Albany with Ray, setting up before 7am. That routine ran for about twelve years of my life. It shaped how I think about making things and selling them more than any business course ever could.
Before I came back to the business I spent six years working for a wholesale importer in Fremantle, mostly sourcing paper goods and craft supplies out of Victoria and South Australia. I learned a lot there about what sells and what sits. I also learned that most of what we were moving was generic, the kind of thing you'd find in three other catalogues. In 2019 I flew back to Albany for Ray's 65th birthday and he showed me the workshop ledger going back to 1971. Sitting there reading it, I realised the business had never really been about the timber. It was about giving people something to do with their hands. That was the thing worth carrying forward.
I registered Halstead Goods in Orange, NSW in early 2020. I'd moved there the previous year with my partner Deborah, who grew up in the region. The name comes from a street in Albany where the workshop sat for nearly three decades. The first real decision was hard: I told Ray I wasn't going to replicate the furniture line. The margin wasn't there for a small online operation and freight from Orange to WA alone would eat us. Instead I focused on kits and guides, things that fit in a satchel, things that helped people sit down and make something. The first order we fulfilled was 47 units in August 2020, packed on our kitchen table in a rented place off Anson Street.
We're still based in Orange. The operation is small by design. Three people, a small warehouse space on the edge of town, and a pretty direct relationship with our customers. Ray still calls on Thursdays. He's retired now but he'll ask about the numbers and tell me I should be doing markets. Maybe he's right. Most of what we stock now fits the same idea he was working with in Manjimup fifty years ago: something to do with your hands, something you can get better at slowly.
— Still packing orders, still answering my own emails. — Simon, Simon Paul Levy
Journal
What a paper mill in Manjimup taught me about stock
I drove four hours to Manjimup expecting a quick handshake and left with a boot full of sample reams and a lot to think about.
Dad used to say that you never really know what you're selling until you've seen where it comes from. He was talking about timber back then, running the old workshop outside Albany, but the logic holds for paper too. I made the trip to Manjimup in early March to meet the team at a small paper merchant we'd been sourcing from for about eight months. They supply the uncoated stock we use inside The maker's Craft Book, and I wanted to see the operation before we committed to a larger run for the second half of the year. It's about a 400-kilometre drive from Albany if you go through Walpole, and I did it in one shot, which I don't recommend.
The merchant, a third-generation family outfit not entirely unlike what we're doing here, takes recycled and virgin fibre from a couple of mills and does their own cutting and finishing on-site. What struck me was how much variation there is in the off-white stock we'd been ordering. I'd assumed consistency was a given, but apparently the fibre source shifts seasonally and the result is a sheet that runs slightly warmer in tone during autumn batches. For a sketchbook or a craft reference, that's not necessarily a problem. It can actually feel better in the hand than the bright white stuff. But you need to know about it before you're 2,000 units deep.
We went through three rounds of samples across the afternoon. The owner, a woman named Trish who has been doing this since she was helping her father stack pallets at fourteen, pulled sheets from different production weeks and held them against a north-facing window. The difference was subtle but real. She suggested we specify a tighter brightness tolerance on our next purchase order and lock in a single production run rather than drawing down across multiple months. It costs a little more upfront but removes the inconsistency. I wrote the number down: roughly 7% more per ream for a dedicated run. Worth it.
I drove back through Pemberton and stopped for dinner in Manjimup itself, which was quiet on a Thursday evening. I sat in the car with a notepad and worked through what I wanted to change about how we specify materials going forward. Dad always kept a handwritten ledger of every supplier he'd ever dealt with, notes on their reliability, their minimums, what they were like on the phone. I've got a spreadsheet, which is faster but probably loses something. There's a reason I still carry a paper notepad. The Craft Book exists partly because of that instinct, the idea that writing things by hand slows you down just enough to actually think.
I'm not sure the trip changed anything dramatic about how we operate, but it reminded me that sourcing is a relationship, not a transaction. Trish will call me if there's a run that looks particularly good. I'll call her before I finalise a print order rather than after. That's the whole point of going in person. My grandfather would have understood that immediately. I sometimes wonder if I'm slow to catch up to things he already knew.
How to actually use Sketch and Sip on a cold evening
Most people open the book once, feel slightly intimidated, and set it on a shelf, so here is what I actually do with mine.
Winter in Orange is genuinely cold. We get frosts through July that last until mid-morning, and by the time dinner is done the idea of doing anything productive is a stretch. That's actually when I reach for Sketch and Sip more than any other time of year. I want to be clear that I'm not a trained artist. I can draw a passable wine glass and I can identify a Chardonnay from the Great Southern by smell about 60% of the time, which is not a brag, it's just context. The book isn't designed for people who already know what they're doing. It's designed for people who want to pay closer attention to something they're already doing, which in this case is drinking wine.
The format I've settled into goes like this. I open a bottle, usually something from the region, a Pinot Noir from Frankland River or a Riesling from Mount Barker, and I pour a glass before I do anything else. Then I open to one of the observation spreads in the first third of the book and I just look at the wine for a minute. Colour, clarity, how it moves. There are prompts on the page but I don't always follow them in order. Sometimes I sketch the glass, sometimes I write notes in the margin, sometimes I just sit there. The point is the pause, not the output.
The sketching component is simpler than it looks. There are 24 guided pages in the book where the basic outlines are already partially drawn, so you're not starting from nothing. I've found the most useful pages are the ones that ask you to map the aromas before you taste. You circle words, cross out the ones that don't fit, add your own in the margins. After about four or five sessions you start to notice that your notes have a pattern. I apparently always smell something green in reds, even when I'm not supposed to. That's the kind of thing you only learn by writing it down repeatedly.
A few things that make it work better in practice. Decent light matters more than you'd think, a single lamp at table height is fine, overhead lighting is too flat. Have a second glass of water nearby because you will want to rinse between tastes if you're going through more than one wine. And don't try to do this when you're already tired, you'll skip the sketching and just drink the wine, which is also fine, but then why bother with the book. I aim for a Friday when I've got nowhere to be at 8am the next morning. That gives me about ninety minutes, which is enough for two wines and a full spread of notes.
I started this product because my grandmother kept a handwritten notebook of every bottle she opened for about thirty years. Tiny observations, a sketch here and there, a pressed label stuck in with tape. When she died we found 6 of those notebooks in a drawer and they were more interesting than any wine app I've ever used. That's the whole idea. Not documentation for its own sake but attention, paid slowly, over time.
Three print runs before Garden Haven looked right to us
The cover of Garden Haven went through three separate print runs and two different printers before I was willing to put it in a box.
I should say upfront that I am not a printer and I don't fully understand everything that goes wrong in the process. What I do understand is what looks right when I hold something in my hands, and the first two attempts at the Garden Haven cover did not look right. The book is a guide to growing food and useful plants in smaller urban spaces, the kind of courtyard or balcony garden that a lot of people in regional centres are working with. The cover needed to feel grounded, earthy, like something you'd find on a shelf in a good garden shed rather than a gift shop. That's a harder brief to execute than it sounds.
The first print run came back with the green in the cover art reading too blue under natural light. It looked fine on screen and fine under the fluorescent lighting in the print shop, but on the bench in our storage room in Orange, next to the window, it was wrong. The foliage looked like it belonged in a swimming pool brochure. I sent it back and asked for a proof with a warmer green, more olive, less teal. The second proof was closer but the uncoated stock I'd specified was pulling the ink differently than the printer expected, and the text on the spine was coming up slightly lighter than the approved file. At that point I drove to Sydney and sat with the press operator for half a day.
The press operator, a man named Gus who has been doing this for over 30 years, was patient in the way that people are patient when they've explained something many times before. He walked me through how uncoated paper absorbs ink differently from coated stock and why the colour values I'd signed off on were technically correct but visually off. We adjusted the ink density on the green channel by a small amount, I think it was 4 points, and ran a test sheet. That was the one. The third run came back and I opened the box in the car park and immediately knew it was right. I called my mum from the car park because she would have understood exactly what that felt like.
The reason I'm writing this down is that there's a version of this business where I just approve a proof on a screen and move on. A lot of people do that. The product arrives and it's fine, technically, and it sells. But we're a business that started in a workshop where my father looked at every piece of timber before it went out the door. He wasn't doing that because he had to. He was doing it because he'd decided that was the standard. I've tried to carry that forward even though I'm selling books rather than furniture and I'm doing it from Orange rather than Albany.
Garden Haven ended up being our second best-selling title in the six months after launch. I don't know if the cover made the difference or if it was just a topic people were ready for. Probably both. But I know that when I look at a copy on a shelf I still think the green is exactly right, and that matters to me more than I can fully explain.
January is a strange month to sell an embroidery kit
Summer in Orange is hot and dry and people are mostly outside, which makes it an odd season to be thinking about needlework.
January in Orange runs hot. We had nine consecutive days above 35 degrees this year, which is not unusual but it's also not comfortable. The stone fruit is finishing up, the grass is yellow by mid-month, and the last thing most people want to do is sit still with a needle and thread. So I was surprised when we had our strongest single month for the considered Embroidery Kit in January. Not slightly stronger, genuinely the best month since we launched it. I've been trying to work out why, and I have a theory, though I could be wrong.
My theory is that people buy the kit in January not because they're going to use it immediately but because they're already thinking about what comes after summer. February starts to cool in the evenings here. By March you can sit outside without the fan on. The kit is something to look forward to, a project for the slower months ahead. We saw a similar pattern with Garden Haven, where purchases spiked in late winter even though people weren't going to start planting for another month. There's something about buying a slow, deliberate project that itself feels like a deliberate choice. You're committing to a future version of your day.
The embroidery kit came out of a conversation I had with my aunt, who learned to embroider from my grandmother in Albany. She still has a half-finished piece in a hoop that she started in 1987 and never completed. She doesn't find that sad. She finds it funny. The kit we put together has 6 linen panels with pre-transferred botanical designs, all drawn from plants you'd actually find in a Western Australian or southern NSW garden, grevillea, native violet, flannel flower. The thread palette is earthy and the instructions are written plainly, without assuming you've ever held a hoop before.
What I've tried to get right with the kit is the first ten minutes. Most craft kits fail at the start. You open the box and there are seventeen components and a folded instruction sheet with diagrams that assume knowledge you don't have. We tested the kit with 12 people who had never done embroidery before and timed how long it took them to make their first stitch. The average was under 8 minutes from opening the box. That felt like the right target. If someone has to stop and google something in the first ten minutes, you've already lost them.
I think about my grandmother's notebooks when I think about the embroidery kit. She was someone who did things slowly and by hand not because it was faster or easier but because the process itself had value for her. I didn't understand that when I was young. I understand it now, especially in January, when the heat makes everything feel urgent and uncomfortable, and a kit sitting on the shelf waiting for March starts to look like a very sensible idea.
Customer reviews
Rachel T. — Fitzroy, VIC — 2024-03-14 — 5/5
Exactly what I was looking for
Ordered the Sketch & Sip book as a birthday gift and it arrived in four days — well within the standard window. Packaging was solid and nothing was damaged. My friend loved it and I've already had two other people ask where I got it.
Marcus B. — New Farm, QLD — 2024-06-02 — 4/5
Good book, slow dispatch
The Australian Bushcraft Handbook is genuinely useful — well-written and practical, not just filler content. My only gripe is that dispatch took two days longer than I expected given I'd ordered mid-week. Once it was on the way, tracking worked fine and it arrived in good shape.
Priya S. — Surry Hills, NSW — 2024-08-19 — 5/5
The embroidery kit is genuinely great
I bought the considered Embroidery Kit half-expecting it to be one of those kits where half the materials are missing or poorly labelled. Everything was there, clearly organised, and the linen quality is noticeably better than what I've bought from craft chain stores. Instructions are clear enough that a beginner could follow them.
Daniel W. — Fremantle, WA — 2024-10-05 — 4/5
Solid product, takes a while to WA
Expected the longer delivery time to Fremantle and it landed on day seven of the standard window, so no complaints there. The Garden Haven book is well put together — lots of practical advice that actually applies to small urban plots, not just people with acreage. Would buy from Halstead again.
Jo M. — Brunswick, VIC — 2024-11-22 — 5/5
Fast, no fuss
Placed an express order for The maker's Craft Book on a Thursday morning and it was on my doorstep Friday afternoon. Exactly what you want when you've left a gift a bit late. The book itself is nicely produced — sturdy cover, good paper weight.
Chloe R. — Paddington, QLD — 2025-01-09 — 5/5
Gift wrapping was a nice touch
Added the gift wrap option for the Sketch & Sip book and it looked really good when it arrived — the kraft paper was neat and the handwritten note was a genuine handwritten note, not a printed facsimile. Recipient was impressed. Will order again for the next occasion.
Tom H. — Hobart, TAS — 2025-02-28 — 4/5
Good range, reasonable prices
I ordered the maker's Craft Book after spending a while comparing similar titles. At $45.99 it's fair value — the content is practical and the layout doesn't feel rushed. Delivery to Hobart took six business days on standard, which is about right. No issues with the order.
Natalie F. — Norwood, SA — 2025-04-11 — 5/5
Exactly as described
The Garden Haven book matched the product description accurately, which sounds like a low bar but isn't always the case with online orders. It arrived well-packaged with no bent corners. I've already worked through the first two chapters and the advice is grounded and specific rather than vague.
Shipping
All orders are dispatched from our workshop in Orange, NSW. Standard orders ship via Australia Post and typically arrive within 3–8 business days. Metro areas in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, and Adelaide usually land at the lower end of that range. Perth, Darwin, Hobart, and regional addresses should allow for the full window. Express orders are handled by StarTrack and are prioritised for same-day dispatch when placed before 2pm AEST Monday to Friday. Express delivery generally takes 1–3 business days to most capital cities. All prices shown at checkout include GST, and your tax invoice is sent automatically with your order confirmation email.
Free standard shipping applies to all orders over $80 AUD. The discount is calculated and applied automatically — you don't need to enter a code. For orders under $80, standard shipping is a flat $9.95 and express is $14.95 regardless of order size or weight. Once your order leaves Orange, you'll receive a tracking number via email so you can follow it through the Australia Post or StarTrack network. We pack everything in recycled cardboard with enough internal padding to keep books and kits from moving around during transit. Flat-rate packaging means no surprise charges based on dimensions.
If your order arrives damaged, take a clear photo of the outer packaging and the item before doing anything else, then email us at hello@halsteadgoods.com.au within 48 hours of delivery. We'll arrange a replacement or refund depending on stock availability and your preference. We lodge the carrier claim on our end — you don't need to deal with Australia Post or StarTrack directly. Please note that delivery timeframes are estimates provided by the carriers and are not guaranteed, particularly during peak periods like November and December. If your parcel is significantly delayed, contact us and we'll investigate with the carrier on your behalf.
Returns
We accept change-of-mind returns within 30 days of the delivery date. To be eligible, the item needs to be unused and in its original packaging with all components intact. For books, that means unread with no cracked spines or writing inside. For kits like the considered Embroidery Kit, all threads, fabric, and accessories need to be present and unused. To start a return, email hello@halsteadgoods.com.au with your order number and a brief reason. We'll confirm eligibility and provide a return address. Return postage for change-of-mind returns is at your cost, and we recommend using a tracked service since we can't process a refund for items that don't reach us.
Your rights under the Australian Consumer Law are separate from our 30-day change-of-mind policy and are not limited by it. If a product arrives faulty, is not fit for its described purpose, or doesn't match what was advertised, you're entitled to a remedy — whether that's a repair, replacement, or refund — regardless of how much time has passed. In those cases, we'll also cover return postage. Please contact us as soon as you notice a problem and include photos where relevant. We'll work through it with you directly without making you jump through unnecessary hoops.
Once we receive and inspect a returned item, we'll process your refund within 5 business days. Refunds go back to the original payment method — credit card, PayPal, or Afterpay depending on how you paid. Processing times on the bank or platform side are outside our control but typically take 2–5 additional business days to appear in your account. We'll send you an email confirmation when the refund is issued. Gift cards and any downloadable content are not eligible for return or refund under our change-of-mind policy. If you have a question about whether your specific situation qualifies, just email us and we'll give you a straight answer.