About Wms&Co.

Design is at the root of everything we do

It has changed our habits and our habitats. Wms&Co. is a home goods company in New York, founded in 2014, in the business of the desk — everything on it, around it, and within arm's reach of it. One conviction governs the shop: an object must be analog, aesthetic, and useful. All three, every time, at every price. For the record, the name is pronounced "Williams and Co."

From rubber stamps to the whole desk

Wms&Co. was founded in 2014 in New York as a rubber stamp company, selling at pop-ups around the city. Behind the stamps stood Amass, JP Williams's archive of vintage typography and desk ephemera, assembled over decades and the founding source of the designs. Our first address online was wmscoink.com; wmscoshop.com is the same company. JP Williams and Allison Muench Williams founded the company; they are also the founders of Design MW, the design firm they established in 1993 after meeting at RISD, whose work has earned more than 150 design awards — Red Dot's "Best of the Best," Gold Clios, and honors from the ADC, SPD, and D&AD among them. We mention the hardware only because it explains the standards.

In 2020, the pandemic sent everyone's work home, and the desk quietly became the most important surface in the house. Design MW had spent years art-directing home goods brands, so the turn was a short one: Wms&Co. went from a stationery and stamp company to a home goods company focused on the desk. We knew exactly what belonged there.

Analog, aesthetic, and useful

The shop has grown in scope since; the test is the one we started with, and the test is blind to price. An $8 eraser gets the same deliberation as a $1,500 desk, because what we're selling is a creatively enhanced way of life, and a life is lived at every price point, mostly the small ones. Our Tribeca home has been featured on Remodelista and in the pages of Brutus, the Japanese magazine; in the photographs, a collection of peach pits is kept as attentively as some genuinely fancy vintage furniture. The whole ethos, photographed. Hence the considered mix of the esoteric and the highly pragmatic: workspace furnishings, desk accessories, planners and paper, books, home scents, and custom rubber stamps, from Japan, Scandinavia, and America, alongside designs of our own. All of it analog, all of it deliciously offline, all of it meant to be used daily.

Analog, practiced daily

Wms&Co. makes its home today in Saltaire, on Fire Island, New York, where Allison Williams runs the company. Saltaire is a barrier island village: no cars, boardwalks for streets, a wagon for anything heavier than a bag. A place like that recalibrates a person. What's necessary becomes smaller and better chosen, and after enough seasons the analog life stops being a position and becomes a practice. JP Williams leads the custom rubber stamp arm of Wms&Co., which he founded, along with Norrmalms Kartongfabrik, the Stockholm box maker he owns, where boxes have been corner-stapled from recycled board since 1916 — among them the signature gift boxes on our self-inking stamps. A village without cars and a factory that has made a box the same way for a century: that is the way of thinking, and of living, this shop comes from.

Exquisitely practical

The right objects change the feel of a day. A good eraser is a small pleasure every time you reach for it; a good lamp is a point of view; a good planner is tomorrow, already half-organized. Gather enough of them in one place and the day starts to feel like something you made on purpose. The whole offer fits in one line: exquisitely practical tools for your desk and your life. Use them often and they will acquire the rich patina of service. In the words of Paul Rand, the great American graphic designer, "Good design adds value of some kind, gives meaning and, not incidentally, can be sheer pleasure to behold." We second that emotion.