Ekhowley Co is a small Cape Town team of buyers, writers and packers. We visit studios in Woodstock and Salt River, handle every piece before it goes on a listing, and write the care notes ourselves. This page is about who does that work, and why the collection is organised by room and material instead of by season.
Ekhowley Co is a small catalogue house in Cape Town. We are not a shop that chases a season. We gather homeware and daily objects from studios and workshops we have visited, then write down what each piece is made of, how it should be cared for, and who made it.
The people behind the catalogue are a handful of us: two who handle sourcing and studio visits, one who photographs and writes the listings, and one who looks after trade orders and deliveries across South Africa. Between us we have spent years in kitchens, guesthouses and rented flats, which shapes what we choose to list. A mug has to survive a shared sink. A runner has to take a hot plate and a spill. A basket has to hold its shape after a year of laundry.
We work with stoneware throwers in Woodstock, a weaving cooperative in KwaZulu-Natal, and a linen mill that has been running the same looms for decades. Some of these relationships are new, others go back further than the catalogue itself. When a maker changes a glaze or a weave, we update the listing rather than quietly swap the photograph.
Ekhowley Co runs on a small group of people who spend more time in studios and workshops than in an office. Every listing in the range passes through their hands before it reaches the page, and each of them carries a different part of that work.
Catalogue and sourcing lead
Twelve years buying for independent homeware shops before joining Ekhowley. She visits the Woodstock and Salt River studios in person, checks wall thickness on every stoneware batch, and writes the care notes that sit under each listing.
Textiles and materials
Trained as a weaver, now the person who tests how linen behaves after twenty washes and whether a dye lot holds its tone. He tracks flax origin and fibre weight, and rejects anything that pills within a season.
Maker relationships and trade
Works directly with the KwaZulu-Natal weaving cooperative and the smaller ceramic studios. She handles sample requests from interior stylists and guesthouses, and keeps the delivery schedule realistic across South Africa.
A piece earns a place in the catalogue if it survives a year of ordinary use in a real home. We keep the range short on purpose, organised by room and material, so a first flat in Observatory and a guesthouse in the Karoo can both find what they need without wading through trend stock.
Most of the range is made within a few hours of Cape Town, with a handful of textiles woven from European flax. We name the studio or cooperative on every listing, along with size, material origin and care notes, because that information is what makes an object worth keeping.
Ekhowley Co did not start with a business plan. It started with a shelf of mismatched mugs in a Sea Point flat and a growing frustration that most homeware either fell apart in a year or looked like everyone else's kitchen.
2019
We spent a winter driving between Woodstock studios and a ceramics co-op outside Wellington, asking the same three questions: what do you make, what does it cost you to make, and would you sell it through someone else. Twelve said yes. The first catalogue was a printed A5 booklet, organised by material because that was the only way we could keep track of who was making what.
2021
Buyers kept writing in to ask whether a linen runner could go in a hot wash, or how to stop a palm basket from drying out in a Northern Cape summer. So every listing now carries size, material origin, and a short care line. It slowed the publishing schedule down, but returns dropped and the questions got better.
2022
Interior stylists and guesthouses in Greyton and Plettenberg Bay were ordering in quantities that did not fit a retail checkout. We separated trade from the main catalogue, added sample requests, and started quoting per project. It kept the retail side simple and gave stylists a proper channel for bulk orders.
2024
We dropped the seasonal drops entirely. The catalogue now runs by room and material, so a stoneware bowl bought for a first flat in Observatory sits in the same section as one ordered for a guesthouse kitchen. Nothing gets retired to make room for a trend, and makers can keep working at the pace their studios actually run at.