Our Story

It started with a place. A small island in the Bay of Islands, on the far west coast of Newfoundland, where people made a living from the water and the woods for the better part of two hundred years, and then one day, left.

The Island

Woods Island sits in the mouth of the Humber Arm, mountains standing on every side. The Mi'kmaq knew these waters as Elmastukwek long before the rest of us came. By the late 1700s a few families had settled the island, fishing cod and herring, cutting wood, keeping gardens in the thin soil.

By 1900 the herring were running so thick the place had its own small boom. At its height the island was home to close to five hundred souls, with a church, a school, and stages and stores strung along the shore. A whole world, built on a rock in the bay.

The Leaving

Then the world moved on. In 1962, under resettlement, the families of Woods Island packed up and left. Some of them floated their houses across the water to Benoit's Cove, whole homes towed behind boats to be set down again on the mainland shore.

The island went quiet. Today it is empty but for the long grass and the old foundations. A small museum at Benoit's Cove still keeps the names, the faces, the photographs. The place is gone. It is not forgotten. Not by us.

Why We Made This

We are not from away. This is our bay, our crowd, our country. Woods Island Outfitters is a way of carrying that place with us, and of putting it on the backs of the people who know exactly what it means.

Every crest is an animal, or a piece of work, or a kind of weather off this coast, drawn the way the old emblems were drawn. Heavy cotton, dark ink, nothing flashy. Made to be lived in, and to last.

The Whole Of It

We are not trying to be a fashion label, and we are not trying to be from anywhere but here. We are trying to make something good, that honours where it comes from, and to do right by the place and the people that made it.

That is the whole of it. Saltwater joys, on a shirt you will wear for years.