The Studio
Phil Picard
Founder, Designer & Master Machinist
Phil Picard has been making things with his hands for thirty-five years. He finds problems, he conceives solutions, he designs and prototypes answers, and he makes every component himself.
Not just assembling. Not just prototyping. Making — from raw material to finished object, by hand, to tolerance, without shortcuts. He has built steam engines from scratch. He has rebuilt classic cars from the ground up. If he needs a bolt that doesn’t exist, he makes it. He has spent decades in the discipline of taking a block of material and removing everything that is not the thing he wants it to become.
He has a burning need to understand how technical things work from first principles. Anything & everything, from working steel with hammer and anvil to PCB design and microprocessor development. Phil's the kind of guy you want around when the Zombie Apocalypse hits.
Tory Depew
Co-Founder, Leatherworker, & Creative Director
As Director of the School of Stage and Screen at Western Carolina University, Tory has spent her career at the intersection of storytelling, production design, and the management of complex creative work at scale. She knows how things are built — not just how they look, but how they hold together under pressure, how materials behave over time, and how an audience reads an object before a single word is spoken.
Her foundation is twenty-five years in costume design and construction for professional stage and screen — period work, Shakespearean work, technically demanding work built to survive performance after performance without failing. That career took her to professional theaters across the country, including a decade at the American Shakespeare Center, where the costumes had to be as historically considered as the productions themselves. It was there, working with period materials and the demands of authentic construction, that her leatherworking practice was forged.