00. Founder
Lon McGowan
For twenty years—long enough to see entire industries rise and collapse, to watch the internet remake commerce twice, and to know that what lasts is never what's loudest, my life has been a series of arrivals and departures.
Building brands—cafes, magazines, tech accessories, interiors, apparel, the kind of work where you can touch the result. Launching products that ranged from tech accessories to leather goods to printed editorial, each one teaching me something about what people actually keep. Designing spaces—retail environments, workplaces, the physical containers where brands come alive and customers decide whether to trust you— where people actually want to spend time.
Seattle, where I built my first company and learned that even the best product needs someone to find it, Boulder, where I understood that lifestyle brands are really just permission structures for how people want to live, Miami, where I saw how design translates across cultures and sometimes doesn't, Paris, where I learned that restraint is its own kind of luxury and that heritage is earned over decades, and now London—a city that holds tradition and innovation in tension, where old things are allowed to age and new ideas still find room. Each city taught me something different about how people live and what they carry with them.
My background resists a clean summary. The thread connecting all of it is experience—not the buzzword, but the actual texture of interacting with physical things: weight in your hand, wear patterns, the moment something clicks into place—how physical things shape the way people move through the world.
A well-designed object—a bag that sits right on your shoulder, a notebook that falls open to the page you need changes behavior. So does a well-designed room. I've spent my career obsessing over that invisible influence, the way design disappears when it's working and only announces itself when it fails.
Canard is where it all converges.
The idea came from years of living out of bags—red-eyes for work, long weekends with friends, solo trips to clear my head, family holidays where I'm somehow responsible for everyone's chargers. Airports, train stations, hotel rooms, meetings in cities I'd only just landed in. When you travel constantly, you realize something: all you have is what you carry. Every item earns its place or becomes dead weight—that jacket you packed 'just in case,' the charger that's slightly too short, the bag with one pocket too few.
That pressure—the suitcase that has to close, the backpack that has to fit under the seat, the seconds you have to find your passport clarifies things. Intention matters. Details—a zipper that opens one-handed, a pocket placed exactly where your hand goes, a strap that adjusts without looking matter. The difference between adequate and exceptional becomes obvious when you're living with it every day.
So I started designing for that life.
The timing—and I don't take this for granted, helps. We're in a moment when building a company looks nothing like it used to. Software handles what used to require entire departments: inventory, shipping, customer service, even design tools that would have cost thousands handles logistics. Fulfillment runs on autopilot. Tools that took teams now take hours. An entrepreneur today can move faster than ever—which means more energy for the only thing that actually matters.
The product.
I'm not trying to build an empire—well, maybe I am. But I have no investors asking about growth metrics, no board meetings, no pressure to scale past the point where I can still touch every decision. I'm trying to design carry essentials I know I'll use, made better than they need to be, with details most people won't notice until they do.
I have a hunch—because if you've read this far, you're probably looking for the same things I am, you'll enjoy them too.
If you would like to get in touch with me directly drop me an email.
