Two names, one word
ar-THUR and a-LEX. A son and a father. Push the names together and you get Thurlex, which didn't exist until we needed it to.
How it started
It started with a father and his son chasing everyday adventure together — weekend trips, garage projects, the ordinary business of taking care of a family. Somewhere in all of that we kept coming back to the same idea: cherish what you already have, fix it before you replace it, and build something new together when it's worth building. Thurlex is what happened when we decided to build that idea into a company instead of just a habit.
What we make
Tools for the ordinary, excellent business of getting things done.
A good tool fixes a kid's bike on a Saturday morning. The same one sets up a tent, builds a fence, or opens the thing that won't open. Most of it sits in a drawer or a bag being quietly useful, and then one day you're glad it's there — not because anything dramatic happened, but because you didn't have to drive to the hardware store.
We don't think there's much of a line between the useful part of your life and the good part. Most of the best bits happen where they overlap. At home, at work, or somewhere with no phone signal.
Four people
Our logo is a family portrait. Two mountain peaks, angular and solid, sharing one unbroken silhouette — that's the two of us, holding each other up. Two four-point lights in the sky above them — that's the rest of our family.
It's on every tool we make, which is a useful thing to have on a product. It means every decision gets held up against four actual people rather than a customer profile.
How we design
Love and family, which sounds soft until you look at what it means in a product.
It means asking whether a tool is safe enough to hand to a teenager. Whether it's light enough that someone will actually carry it. Whether the grip works for a smaller hand. Whether the instructions make sense to someone who has never done this before. Whether it's the kind of thing you'd give to someone you love — because we do, constantly, and that turns out to be a demanding test.
It also means saying what a tool can't do. Every product page here names its trade-off, including the times when the cheaper Thurlex tool is the better answer.
Where we are
California. When something goes wrong, one of us reads the email — there's no queue and no script.
— Alex and Arthur