I'm a stay-at-home father, building a business in the hours around it.

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The work I could find when I was young was the kind you feel the next morning - sore back, aching hands, the smell of a long shift. For a long time, that was simply what work was. Then I stumbled into a decade of management, until a layoff and a new baby rearranged everything at once. My wife went back to her career. I stayed home with our daughter. That was the part that mattered.

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Somewhere in there, I started making things - wood, leather, by hand - and ran straight into a strange guilt. Because I enjoy every part of it. Even the parts I hate, I'm spoiled to enjoy - because I already know what the discomfort produces. And something you love that much has a hard time calling itself work.

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The name is how I argue with that. Button is what I've always called my daughter - a nickname that simply arrived one day and stayed. 4Button is the reminder I built for myself: that this is work, that I'm building something with no ceiling, that the hours you enjoy still count.

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So I keep nearly everything in my own hands - the products, the packaging, the artwork, all of it. Part stubbornness, part self-reliance: if it ever came to it, I'd know I could build the whole thing from nothing.

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I was once told the secret to French cooking: you cannot make a tomato better than the earth, the sun, and time already have. Your job is to recognize the one that got their favour, and then not screw it up. That's the whole of what I do. I can't make leather better than the animal, or better than the centuries of skill in the hands it passed through before it reached my bench. What I can do is keep training my eye toward their favour - choosing well, then bringing everything I have, clean and exacting, to the work. When I look at a finished piece and genuinely don't want to sell it, that's how I know it's done.

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Honest, beautiful things, created by hand. Made to outlast me.