Two cities. One surface.
Slate & Cloth was built at the meeting point of Scandinavian restraint and Scottish craft — a desk surface for people who think about their workspace the way they think about the rest of their home.
View CollectionsEvery piece we make carries two places in it, not one.
Norway
Where the idea startedWilliam Hansson grew up around Nordic product design — restraint, proportion, the belief that a functional object still deserves to look considered. That sensibility became the design language behind every Slate & Cloth piece.
Scotland
Where it's madeJack Shields is based in Glasgow, which pointed the search for a manufacturing partner toward Scotland's craft tradition — mills with generations of experience turning woven cloth into something that holds up to real, daily use.
"Everything else on our desks was considered. The mousepad never was."
Slate & Cloth started with two people who spent more time optimising their desks than working at them. Jack Shields, in Glasgow, and William Hansson, in Oslo, connected over a shared interest in computing — gaming rigs, custom builds, the kind of workspace setups people spend years fine-tuning.
Somewhere in all that fine-tuning, the mousepad kept being the one thing that let the setup down: thin, disposable, and never made with the same care as everything around it. Looking across the market, the pattern held everywhere in Europe — plenty of options, very little that felt considered.
So they built one. William brought a design sensibility shaped by Nordic product design — restraint, proportion, the belief that a functional object still deserves to look considered. Jack, based in Glasgow, pointed the search for a manufacturing partner toward Scotland's craft tradition — mills with generations of experience turning woven cloth into something built to hold up to real, daily use.
That combination is still how we operate: design considered enough to belong on a desk, built by people who've spent generations perfecting the material it's made from.
Three things we won't compromise on
Considered materials
Every surface is woven, not printed onto a stock blank — sourced from mills chosen for how the material performs after a year of daily use, not just on day one.
Small, deliberate runs
Collections are limited by design. We'd rather sell out of something we're proud of than keep a mediocre design in stock indefinitely.
Service that doesn't scale down
No chatbots standing in for a real answer. If something isn't right, you'll hear back from someone who can actually fix it.
“We wanted the kind of company we'd want to buy from ourselves — where the person answering your email actually cares if you're happy.”
— Jack Shields & William Hansson, Co-FoundersExplore the current collections
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