Our story — Meet Trudy
I ran the front of house at Lola's in Surry Hills for six years, and before that I spent three years sommelier-ing at a place in Fitzroy that no longer exists. Hospitality is a small world. You get to know the same thirty suppliers across two cities, you call them by their first names, you know which ones will pick up the phone at 10pm on a Saturday. When lockdown hit in March 2020 and we shut Lola's for what turned out to be four months, I had time to think about what I actually wanted to do with those relationships. Turns out I wanted to build something that didn't depend on a dining room being open.
Before the floor work I trained as a chef at TAFE Ultimo, then spent two years in a kitchen in Newtown before deciding I was better at talking to people than sweating over a pass. The hospitality background meant I cared a lot about materials. You handle linen, timber, ceramic, and leather every single day in a good restaurant. You know the difference between something that lasts a season and something that lasts a decade. I started keeping a spreadsheet in 2019 of every supplier I respected, what they made, where they were based, and roughly what minimum order looked like. It was about 47 contacts by the time I stopped adding to it.
In July 2021 I called Geoff at Bowral Wool Co and asked if he could do small-run throws without a 500-unit minimum. He said 80 units. I ordered 80 units, put them in my spare room in Marrickville, built a Shopify store over one weekend, and listed them. They sold out in 11 days. That was the actual decision moment. Not a plan, not a pitch deck. Just a phone call to someone I already trusted, and a number that made sense. I registered the business in August 2021 and started working through the spreadsheet. Every product on the site now traces back to a supplier I met through the restaurant industry.
We're based out of a small studio on Sydenham Road in Marrickville. I pack most orders myself on Tuesday and Thursday mornings before 9am, and we use a local courier that picks up from the loading bay out back. Revenue in the 2023 financial year was just under $340,000. I still answer the customer emails. The brand is small on purpose. I know exactly where everything comes from because I know the people who make it, and I want to keep it that way.
— Thanks for shopping small. — Trudy, Trudy Lee Tangata
Journal
How the coasters came from a cold store in Botany
The kangaroo leather coasters exist because of a tannery contact I made running a restaurant in Surry Hills, and that story is worth telling properly.
When I was running the kitchen on Crown Street back in 2018 and 2019, we sourced our kangaroo fillet through a game meat supplier based out of a cold store in Botany. The rep who handled our account, a guy called Darren, had been in the industry for about 22 years and knew more about sustainable harvest quotas in New South Wales than anyone I've met before or since. We'd talk while he unloaded, which is how I learned that the hides from that same supply chain were going to a small tannery operation in regional Queensland. Most people in hospitality never think past the cut on the plate. I did, eventually, because Darren kept bringing it up.
When I closed the restaurant in mid-2021, I called Darren on a Tuesday afternoon with no real plan, just a question about whether that tannery still took small orders. He said he'd ask. Three weeks later I had a contact name, a price sheet, and a minimum order of 18 hides. That felt like a lot for someone sitting at a kitchen table in Marrickville with a half-formed idea. I ordered anyway, because the leather was genuinely unlike anything I'd handled before, firm and tight-grained, and I knew that if I didn't commit to something specific I'd just keep thinking about it.
The coasters took about four months to get right in terms of dimensions. I went through two local leatherworkers before finding someone in Newtown who understood what I was after: a flat, dense cut that wouldn't curl at the edges after a few rounds of condensation from a cold glass. The final size, 10 centimetres square, came from testing on my own dining table with a mix of wine glasses and tumblers over a fortnight. It sounds overly careful for a coaster. It isn't. A coaster that curls is useless, and I'd spent enough years watching expensive glassware leave rings on timber to care about the detail.
The tannery in Queensland uses a vegetable tanning process, which matters because it means the leather continues to develop a patina over time rather than staying static. I'm not going to oversell what that means in practice: it just means the surface darkens slightly where it gets handled most, and after a year or so a set of coasters starts to look like it belongs somewhere rather than just sitting there. A few customers have sent me photos of their sets after 12 months of use and the difference is noticeable. That feedback was more useful to me than any review, because it confirmed the material was doing what I thought it would.
Darren got a case of Brackenridge candles sent to him last Christmas, which felt like the least I could do. He texted to say they smelled like a bush walk, which I took as a compliment. The supply chain that started as a Tuesday phone call now accounts for the product I get asked about most, which still surprises me a little when I think about how close I came to not making that call.
Getting the most from the eucalyptus candle in winter
Sydney winters are mild enough that people underestimate them, but a cold Marrickville terrace in July is a different thing entirely from what the weather app suggests.
I live in a mid-terrace in Marrickville that was built in the 1920s, which means the walls are solid brick and the front rooms are genuinely cold from June through August. There's no central heating. Most mornings between July and early September I'm in a jumper indoors, and the appeal of a candle is partly practical and partly just psychological, that small circle of warmth and smell that makes a room feel less like a waiting room. I started making the eucalyptus candle partly because I wanted something that smelled like the Blue Mountains without being the kind of synthetic blast that most eucalyptus products tend to be.
The scent base uses a combination of Eucalyptus globulus and Eucalyptus radiata essential oils, which have slightly different profiles. Globulus is the sharper, more medicinal note that most people recognise from cough drops. Radiata is softer and slightly fruity underneath. I use them at a ratio of about 60:40 in favour of radiata, because I found in testing that pure globulus became fatiguing after about 30 minutes in an enclosed room. The candle has a burn time of around 45 hours, and the fragrance load is 8 percent by weight, which is on the higher end for soy wax but necessary to carry the eucalyptus properly without it disappearing after the first hour.
In winter I burn mine in the back room, which is about 14 square metres, and I light it for roughly 2 to 3 hours in the evening. The first thing I'd say is to trim the wick to about 5 millimetres before each burn. I know everyone says this and most people ignore it. The reason it matters is that a long wick creates a larger flame, which tunnels through the wax rather than allowing the melt pool to spread to the edges. If the melt pool doesn't reach the edge within the first two burns, you'll have a candle that lasts 20 hours instead of 45 because the outer wax never melts.
The second thing is room size. The candle is designed for a room between 10 and 20 square metres. In a larger open-plan space the scent disperses before it builds, and you end up burning it longer to compensate, which shortens the life. In a small bathroom or a bedroom under 8 square metres it can become quite intense, especially radiata, which some people find slightly heady in concentration. I've had customers in inner-city apartments tell me they burn it in the hallway with the bedroom door open, which is a reasonable solution. The point is that the space matters as much as the candle itself.
Sydney's winters are short. By late September the evenings are warm enough that I stop burning candles indoors and move them to the back step, where the scent sits differently in the open air, lighter and less defined. That's a different experience, not worse, just seasonal. The eucalyptus candle is at its best in a closed room on a cold night, and those nights in Marrickville are numbered, so I try to use them properly while they last.
Printing the wattle blossom art took longer than expected
Finding a printer in Sydney who could handle uncoated cotton rag paper at the size I wanted without banding issues took the better part of three months.
The wattle blossom wall art started as a photograph I took on the walking track near Faulconbridge in the lower Blue Mountains in August 2023, when the golden wattle was at its best along the ridge line. I was up there for a weekend and had no plan to make a product out of it. I just took the photo on my phone because the light was good and the clusters were dense and very yellow in a way that looked almost unreal. When I got back to Marrickville I kept looking at it on my laptop and thinking it would work large, printed on something with texture rather than the usual glossy stock.
The challenge was finding a printer who could work with 300gsm cotton rag paper at A2 size without the output showing banding, which is those faint horizontal lines that appear when the print head isn't calibrated correctly for a heavier, uncoated substrate. I contacted seven print studios between Surry Hills and Ultimo over about six weeks. Four of them said they could do it, and when I received samples from those four, two had visible banding and one had a colour shift that made the yellow wattle clusters look greenish, which defeated the entire point. The seventh studio, a small operation in Chippendale, got it right on the second sample.
The Chippendale studio uses an Epson SC-P9570 with pigment inks, which have better longevity on uncoated paper than dye-based alternatives. The print operator there, a woman called Renata, spent about 40 minutes on a video call with me going through colour profiles before we ran the second sample. She adjusted the yellow channel slightly because the original image was captured on a phone sensor that tends to oversaturate warm tones in bright conditions. The corrected version looked exactly like the morning I took the photo, which sounds like a small thing but took three months to arrive at.
I decided to offer the print in one size only, A2, because A3 felt too small for the image to read properly from across a room, and anything larger than A2 would have pushed the retail price past a point I wasn't comfortable with for an unframed print. The cotton rag paper has a slight tooth to it, visible at close range, that gives the print a quality that flat glossy stock doesn't. I'm aware that describing paper texture sounds like the kind of thing only a graphic designer or a very particular home cook would care about. I am, apparently, the latter.
The prints arrive to customers in a rigid tube, rolled with a layer of glassine between the print and the outer paper. Renata suggested the glassine after one of her other clients had an issue with ink transfer during shipping. Small detail, solved before it became a problem. I appreciate that kind of thinking, partly because in restaurants you learn quickly that most disasters are just unaddressed small details.
Summer in the kitchen and what the board taught me
February in a Newtown share house kitchen taught me more about how people actually use a cutting board than any amount of product research would have.
My sister moved into a share house in Newtown in January, and I spent most of February at her kitchen table on Saturday afternoons while she cooked. She uses the bamboo cutting board in a way that I would not have predicted when I was designing it, which is to say she uses it for everything at once, bread, fruit, herbs, the edge of a hot pot occasionally when she can't find a trivet. She's 27 and she cooks the way most people her age cook, which is fast, practical, and without much ceremony. Watching her use the board across four or five weekends taught me things about the product that six months of my own use hadn't.
The thing I noticed first was that she never oiled it. I'd included a small card in the packaging explaining that bamboo benefits from food-grade mineral oil applied every 4 to 6 weeks, particularly in a dry summer, which Sydney's February certainly qualifies as. The card was still in the drawer. The board looked fine, no cracking, no warping, which is partly because bamboo is naturally less porous than hardwood and partly because her kitchen gets reasonable ventilation and she doesn't leave the board sitting in water. But I updated the card anyway after those visits to make the oiling instruction clearer and more direct, because a card that ends up in a drawer is a card that failed to communicate.
The other thing I noticed was the size. The board is 38 centimetres by 26 centimetres, which I chose because it fits comfortably on most standard Australian kitchen benches without overhanging the edge. In my sister's kitchen, which has an older Laminex bench that's narrower than average, it worked well. In a conversation with a customer in Surry Hills who emailed me in January, the feedback was the opposite, that the board felt slightly too large for a galley-style apartment kitchen. I don't have plans to add a second size yet, but I'm keeping a note.
February in Sydney is the kind of heat where you don't want to be in a kitchen any longer than necessary, and watching my sister cook in that heat with the windows open and the fan going reminded me of summer service in a restaurant, the same compressed urgency, the same sense that every surface is being used simultaneously. A cutting board in that context isn't furniture, it's a tool, and it needs to be stable, flat, and easy to wipe down. The bamboo board handles all three of those things well, which is the minimum standard I set when I was designing it.
By late March the temperature had dropped enough to make cooking feel enjoyable again rather than obligatory. My sister called to say the board had developed a slight warm tone after she finally oiled it, which she described as looking less new. I took that as a reasonable outcome for a product that's been in active use for two months in a Sydney summer kitchen.
Customer reviews
Sarah M. — Fitzroy, VIC — 2024-03-14 — 5/5
Wool throw is the real deal
Ordered the Wool Blanket Throw on a Tuesday and it arrived by Thursday, which surprised me given I'm in Melbourne. The weight and texture are exactly what I was after — not scratchy, not too light. It's been on the couch every evening since it arrived.
James K. — New Farm, QLD — 2024-06-02 — 4/5
Good coasters, packaging could be better
The Kangaroo Leather Coaster Set looks great on the coffee table and the leather feels solid. My only gripe is that one corner of the box was a bit crushed in transit, though the coasters themselves were fine. Would buy again.
Priya N. — Subiaco, WA — 2024-08-19 — 5/5
Lovely candle, scent is just right
I've bought a lot of eucalyptus candles over the years and most are either too synthetic or too faint. The Brackenridge one sits in a nice middle ground — noticeable without being overwhelming. Burn time seems solid too, I'm about halfway through after several weeks of regular use.
Tom B. — Brunswick, VIC — 2024-10-07 — 4/5
Cutting board holds up well
The Bamboo Cutting Board is a decent size and doesn't warp after hand washing, which was my main concern with bamboo. It arrived well packaged and faster than the estimated delivery window. Nothing flashy, just a good, solid board.
Chloe R. — Manly, NSW — 2024-11-22 — 5/5
Bought as a housewarming gift
Ordered the Wattle Blossom Wall Art as a gift with the gift wrapping option. The wrapping was neat and the handwritten note was a genuine touch. My friend messaged me the same day it arrived to say how much she liked it — the print quality is really clean.
David O. — Hobart, TAS — 2025-01-09 — 5/5
Fast to Hobart, which I didn't expect
I always brace for slow delivery to Tasmania but the candle arrived in four business days on standard shipping. It was packaged well with no damage. The scent is subtle and clean — exactly what I was hoping for.
Amelia S. — Norwood, SA — 2025-02-28 — 4/5
Wall art looks great, minor framing note
The Wattle Blossom Wall Art is a good size for the space I had in mind and the print itself is sharp and nicely coloured. The backing wasn't quite square when it arrived but it's barely noticeable once hung. Customer service responded quickly when I flagged it, which I appreciated.
Lena W. — West End, QLD — 2025-04-15 — 5/5
Blanket is exactly what the photos show
Sometimes products look different in person but the Wool Blanket Throw matched the website photos closely. The colour is a warm, natural grey and the stitching along the edges is even and tight. I've already recommended it to two friends.
Shipping
All Brackenridge Co orders ship from our workshop in inner Sydney. Standard orders go via Australia Post and typically arrive within 3–8 business days — Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Adelaide metro areas are usually on the faster end of that range, while regional NSW, rural Queensland and Western Australia can take closer to 8 business days. Express orders are dispatched via StarTrack and arrive within 1–3 business days for most capital city addresses. Orders placed before 2pm AEST Monday to Friday are dispatched the same day. Orders placed after that cutoff, or on weekends and public holidays, go out the next business day. All prices shown on our website include GST.
Free standard shipping applies to all Australian orders over $100. For orders under that amount, standard shipping starts at $9.95 and express starts at $14.95, with the final rate calculated at checkout based on your postcode and order weight. We ship to all states and territories including Tasmania, the Northern Territory and remote postcodes, though delivery to very remote areas may take beyond the standard estimate. Once your order leaves us, you'll receive an email with your tracking number so you can follow it through the Australia Post or StarTrack network.
We pack every order carefully using recycled cardboard and paper fill to reduce movement in transit. If your order arrives damaged, please take photos of the packaging and the item before doing anything else, then contact us at hello@brackenridgeco.com.au within 48 hours of delivery. We'll arrange a replacement or refund promptly — you won't need to return a damaged item in most cases. For any parcel that goes missing in transit, we'll lodge an investigation with the carrier on your behalf and keep you updated throughout the process.
Returns
We want you to be happy with what you've bought. If you change your mind, you can return most items within 30 days of the delivery date, provided they're unused, in their original packaging, and in a condition suitable for resale. To start a return, email hello@brackenridgeco.com.au with your order number and reason for return, and we'll send you the return address and instructions. Return shipping costs for change-of-mind returns are the responsibility of the buyer. Once we receive and inspect the item, we'll process your refund within 5–7 business days back to your original payment method.
Under the Australian Consumer Law, you're entitled to a remedy if a product is faulty, doesn't match its description, or isn't fit for the purpose we said it would serve. In those cases, we'll cover return shipping and offer you a replacement, repair, or full refund depending on the nature of the fault and your preference. You don't need to return the item in its original packaging for a genuine fault claim. Please contact us as soon as you notice a problem — the sooner we know, the faster we can sort it out for you.
A few things we can't accept back: items marked as sale or clearance, custom or personalised orders (including monogrammed pieces), candles that have been burned, and any items returned outside the 30-day window without prior agreement. If you're unsure whether your item qualifies for a return, just email us and we'll give you a straight answer. We're a small business and we'd rather resolve things fairly than lose a customer over a policy technicality.