Swans Island Company: Maine Blanket Maker Bill Laurita

Lisa Belisle: Hello, I'm Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to or watching Radio Maine, a podcast dedicated to creativity and the human spirit, which is produced and sponsored by the Portland Art Gallery in Portland, Maine. Today my guest is the president of Swans Island, Bill Laurita. Nice of you to come in today.

Bill Laurita: Thanks for having me, Lisa. And if I may ask, what are you a doctor of?

Lisa Belisle: I am a medical doctor, actually. So the random medical doctor who does a podcast on creativity and the human spirit.

Bill Laurita: What's your specialty?

Lisa Belisle: I'm a family doctor.

Bill Laurita: A family doctor, okay. And practicing?

Lisa Belisle: Yes. Well, I work as a chief medical officer for a health system now.

Bill Laurita: I see. Okay.

Lisa Belisle: Are you practicing for your own podcast here? Are you interviewing me?

Bill Laurita: Well, I just like to get a sense for who's interviewing me and have it be more of a dialogue instead of a monologue, and to understand where you're coming from. That's all.

Lisa Belisle: Well, I think that's a fair question. As a family doctor, and I've been in practice for many years, I like getting to know people and understanding where they're coming from, because not only does it help if I'm working with somebody with their health, but also the happiness of being a human on the planet. One of the reasons I do these conversations is to find out more about what makes people tick, what keeps them happy, and what they do in their daily lives. It's probably very different than the work I do in medicine.

Bill Laurita: It's all about health. A holistic approach to health.

Lisa Belisle: I would say. Yeah.

Bill Laurita: Well, I can see that connection. It makes a lot of sense.

Lisa Belisle: So tell me about Swans Island.

Bill Laurita: Well, let's see. Swans Island Companies, it's the official name. It was founded in 1992 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, by two people who became friends. John and Carolyn Grace were attorneys and wanted to do something completely different with their lives, sort of a joint midlife crisis perhaps. There were these old blankets in John's family. John is a flinty, old New Englander whose mom passed away at 103 or so, and John looks the exact same now as when I met him many years ago. Great guy. They said, I wonder if anyone's making these blankets, and these are really great blankets to sleep under. They've held up well through generations of the Grace family. They looked into it, no one was making them, and they said, well, why don't we make them? And so they learned how to make blankets.

I'm editing a story here for you. They had a place on Swans Island, and that's where they wanted to end up in their semi-retirement, and they didn't want to run a business per se. In fact, they scoffed and laughed at friends who told them, you need a business plan if you're going to make blankets and try to sell them. They thought that was hilarious. Not a bad way to found a company, in my opinion, because all they cared about was making the best blanket possible. They didn't need to make a tremendous amount of money. They're pretty frugal people, I think that's safe to say. So they just went about making what they felt was the very best blanket they could. That is a blanket made out of wool with the wool yarn spun in a certain fashion, a woolen spun yarn, without getting too much into the weeds, and what's called an open weave.

So if we think of an army blanket, maybe from our youth or camp or something, and how scratchy and stiff that was, that was not a good way to make a blanket. An open weave is one that leads to the best hand. The hand is the way that, let's say if you throw a piece of fabric up in the air and it kind of floats, the way it feels in your hand, the drape of it. That's what makes the best blanket, one that you don't wake up feeling damp under. So that's what they did, irrespective of the finances of it. They relocated to Swans Island, which is a very romantic idea, making blankets on an island in the middle of Penobscot Bay. They would do things like, well, we'll be open from two to five Monday through Friday, and even then maybe we'll want to go for a walk, and someone will come by and they would tell them, go and look at the blankets. If you like something, leave a check. We're going for a walk.

Then some health problems cropped up for them. They couldn't continue. They got in touch with us, us being my wife and I and my brother, and said, you guys should take this business over. We raised our children in Charlottesville, Virginia, and we were both Waldorf teachers, if you're familiar with that form of education, which is also very holistic and process oriented. Without getting too much into the weeds, we said, yes, we will do this. So we went up on the island and apprenticed, learned how to make blankets, how to dye yarn, how to sell blankets. In the meantime, we did not want to live on Swans Island because it's pretty isolating. But we wanted to be on the coast of Maine, and that made sense. So we bought a farmhouse on Route One in Northport, renovated it, added to it, and moved the company after our apprenticeship to Northport. That was 2004, and now we're almost at 2024. So it's almost 20 years on the coast and it's over 30 years as a company. I'm not sure exactly what your original question was, but that was an answer to some question.

Lisa Belisle: Well, I think it provided good background on what the Swans Island Company is and the origin story. I'm actually interested, since you brought it up, in why somebody who used to be involved in Waldorf education, why this would seem like a reasonable next step for you and your wife.

Bill Laurita: Right. Well, my wife never had the intention of staying with the company. One of the reasons we were interested in moving to the midcoast is because there was a Waldorf school there, the Ashwood Waldorf School, and she ended up becoming the director of that school for many, many years. But for me, I had always worked a lot with my hands. I was a blacksmith, a carpenter, built a lot of furniture, and very interested in how do you take a raw material, take it through a process, and make something that's useful, functional, but also beautiful. So that's an ongoing interest of mine. I was also fascinated by how does the economy really work? I was a history teacher as well, prior to being a Waldorf teacher. I taught history at the high school level.

So I'm always interested in how is this world put together, and particularly the economy, how does that work? What's supply? What's demand? What is a supply chain? How do you get involved in that in a small way? This isn't General Motors or Apple computer, but what impact does it have on a local community? How do you work with employees, cash flow? All of those things I found very broadly interesting. So putting that interest, combining that with my ongoing compelling interest in how you make things, it seemed like a good idea at the time. Even though I had worked in different mediums, in wood and in metal, it was like, well, this is a different medium, but it's also a process. And it's so much about details. I remember very well the first time I was involved in warping a loom. The warp is the vertical threads, and the weft, or woof they call it, or fill yarn, those are the horizontal threads.

To set a loom up, it's called warping a loom. You've got to set your vertical up first. When you do it the way that we do, you have the old warp that's on there and you have a new warp that you've wound onto a beam, and then you have to connect those two somehow. The way you do that is you tie a knot, and in our case, on one particular set of blankets, you tie 3,456 knots. And I thought, that's crazy. You can't tie over 3,000 knots every time you make 20 blankets and you warp the loom. In fact, that's exactly what you do. Another thing that we do, because we don't harshly treat the fleece with harsh chemicals to burn out the chaff from fleece coming from sheep on a farm, they're animals. They get vegetative matter in their fleece.

What we do is, after it's spun and then we weave it, or dye it, and then we finish it into a finished product, there's little bits of chaff left in there because it's been organically processed. We take surgical tweezers and we pick that chaff out by hand. That was another thing that was like, that's crazy. You can't do that. And sometimes it can take hours to do that if the fleece is dirty. So in fact, you do do that, and that is the way that you maintain some of the lanolin. If you don't treat that fleece harshly and burn out all that chaff, you also leave in some of the lanolin, which is that natural grease. And that leads to longevity in the finished product and also a nice suppleness to it. Our blankets, wool products that are made the right way, will last many, many generations, just like that first blanket that inspired the company.

So we sell the blankets in a linen bag that we construct, and it has aromatic cedar planks built right into it. That is a natural moth repellent, of course, and it has a little card, and on that card it says who bought it, and then there's a space for the multiple generations who are going to receive that blanket next. We also have an organic cleaning service and a blanket hospital, should anything happen to your blanket. We can pill it, should it pill up, should you have a moth hole, we can reweave that. If the neighbor's dog gets to it and takes a big bite out of your blanket, we can patch it or reweave that back into existence. So the idea that we're standing behind our product, making something that we really believe in, we want to keep that connection going. We don't want to just sell the thing and then, thank God this thing's out the door, let's hope we never see them again. In fact, we want to see you again. We want to hear about how your blanket's doing, and want to help you care for that blanket and hopefully sell you more. So, again, I feel like I'm meandering a little bit, but there you have it.

Lisa Belisle: Aside from the blanket piece, do you have a longer standing connection to Maine?

Bill Laurita: I do now. My mom grew up in New York City, and if you could afford it, and this is still I think the case, you live in New York City and you have young children, you send them to camp. So my mom and my aunt, two sisters, went to camp at the Pinecrest camp. My mom always had a love of Maine, and particularly the smell of pine. So I grew up with that as an idealized place. And then before the camera started rolling here, we were talking about my brother Jim. He moved up here because he was a vet, and he got on with a guy named Vic in Camden and learned the trade after he'd had his education. Because he had worked in the circus years earlier with my older brother Tom, he had this connection with elephants from that circus.

As he was getting on in his vet practice, and I think it's fair to say sort of what comes next after cats and dogs, he remembered those elephants that he'd worked with, and that they were getting old and they had some injuries, and elephants are pack animals. When one of them is injured, the others shun them. So he knew that these, Rosie and Opal were the two elephants' names, needed care. He decided to open up an elephant clinic in Maine. And, long story short, he passed away doing that work that he loved. So I think when you have someone in your family who's gone through an experience like that and then passed away, in a way you do have a connection with that space. I hadn't lived here prior to moving here in 2004. My parents moved up here, other siblings moved up here. So I have a lot of family now in the area, but not one of these multigenerational situations that many people in Maine have. But yes, I feel a connection to Maine, and both my wife and I love it here. We'll never leave. What a great place.

Lisa Belisle: I completely agree. Your brother was very well known for the Hope Elephants, because that's where they were located. A lot of people would say, this is the Hope elephant guy. Which, for anybody who's watching, we don't actually have elephants here. It's not native to our state. So that was something that I think really piqued a lot of curiosity from people.

Bill Laurita: And I'd say the through line for Jim and me, and others in my family, is that we always grew up with the idea that anything was possible. He had an expression. He never thought, why not bring elephants to Maine? No one's done it. So is that a reason to not do it? And I would say, making blankets, especially the way that we make them, handwoven, and we have lots of other products, but what we're really known for and what we hang our hat on are these handwoven products. If you were trying to think of how am I really going to make a living and what's the best way to earn the most money, you would not make handwoven blankets. That would be a really poor idea. So, the impossible is not a term unknown to my family.

Lisa Belisle: So where do you think that came from? I'm assuming this didn't just start with Jim and with you, this starting with no. Where is that from in your family?

Bill Laurita: Well, that's a metaphysical question perhaps, but I think the quick answer is that my mom and dad definitely raised us with this idea that nothing that you could think of was impossible. Now, I think probably they took it to an extreme degree in their lives in a certain respect. But we all grew up with that sense that we could be authors of our own destiny, and that we could forge a path irrespective of the facts, let's say, or the odds of something working out. And I think the thing I had to learn was, as I alluded to earlier, forging your own path, and this is something I've tried to pass on to my own children, is a lot of work. If you had decided to become a different kind of doctor and taken a very alternative path, and maybe you did, I don't know, but there wouldn't have been as clear a path forward for you as there is perhaps in family medicine. It was very laid out, this is what I should do.

So it is a lot of work to forge a different path, but it's work I'll happily take up. And this is about creativity. My creativity is figuring out, there's a dance here. Every company is similar to every other company in a certain respect. And every company is also its own unique thing. So for us, we're doing this very unusual thing, this artisanal thing that in a certain respect doesn't make a lot of economic sense, because we're not producing the least expensive product for the lowest price with the fewest inputs, not at all.

But the company exists in a system, an economy. So how do we take this thing that we're doing and continue to do it with authenticity and with being able to feel good about the product we're putting forward and the people we're employing and the process that we're following, respecting that process? How does that fit into an economy where you have a cash flow, you've got debt, you've got taxes, you have HR issues, you have to pay people enough that they can live? You've got to organize the company in a certain way, you've got to raise capital. So that's what I really love. I love that challenge of trying to do that. And, man, it ain't easy. I'm not going to lie to you. It is not easy. And then doing it in a state like Maine, where how do you find a CFO? How do you find a really good marketing person? This is the Portland area. I live an hour and 45 minutes north here in Camden, Maine. So where are those people? I find it fascinating, and to live, I guess to some degree, by the seat of my pants. Otherwise I wouldn't be doing this.

Lisa Belisle: Well, I can relate to this. I simplified it for you by saying I'm a family doctor. I ran my own practice, which was acupuncture, integrative medicine, and family medicine. There were kind of two things. I ran my own practice at a time when many physicians were actually being kind of subsumed by larger systems. And also I went down a route that many traditional physicians at the time were saying didn't make a lot of sense to them. So not only philosophically do you have to remain dedicated to what it is that you've chosen for ideals, but also how do you make that a reality financially. So I can relate to that. And you probably won't run into that many doctors doing a video podcast on creativity and the human spirit. There are doctors doing podcasts, but I'm also interested in the second piece that you've raised. My husband, who's the owner of the Portland Art Gallery, he spent many years building businesses in Maine.

Bill Laurita: He's just over here, and...

Lisa Belisle: He's just behind the other side of the camera. He and I oftentimes would have these conversations about how do you bring in the talent that you need? How do people with expertise, how do you bring in a chief financial officer? How do you find the people who know how to do this work? Because you certainly can home grow them in some cases. But if you're trying to attract somebody from New York City, let's say, to come to Maine to be your CFO, you're probably not going to be able to offer them the same financial package. So how have you approached that with this Maine business?

Bill Laurita: I'm on, I think, our seventh CFO, but this one, Justin Maser is his name. He's really fantastic. He's been with the company now for eight years. So it was the first 10 years or something like that where we went through a lot of people in that position. I understand very well how money works, especially now, after doing this for 20 years in the economy and in a small company. But there's no chance in hell that I could put together the documentation or do the kind of detail work, the data analysis, that Justin does, or someone in that position. So, without going into too much detail, he moved to Maine because he was just looking for the best place to live. And so the corollary of how do you find these people is, if you are one of those people, where do you get work?

So it's a matter of a certain destiny of where these paths come together. And I'd like to think one of the things I'm good at, or I really try to work at, is recognition. Can I recognize when that person's in front of me, or am I just saying, well, you can't find it, it's impossible. Well, of course it's not impossible. It's difficult. Much more difficult things have been accomplished, so you can find the right people. So we have a very talented CFO who also does operations, who's very data-driven. Great complement to me. The other executive in the company is Michelle Orn. She's creative director. She has so many skills, again, that I don't have, and is fantastic at building websites and photo shoots and knitwear design in particular. That's what she did prior to coming to Swans Island. So she's fantastic at what she does.

We have a really great team, but it's taken a long time to build it. And then of course, part of my job is to hold that team together and keep everyone focused on what's coming next and how do we deal with the challenges that we have, while maintaining that thread of what is the company. I often think about that. Is the company the spreadsheets? Is it the website? What is the company? And in our case, I always come back to the same thing. The company is those blankets. That's the company. We have a staff meeting once a week with the production team, and I always try to inspire them that way. This is the company, the work that you guys are doing. I joke sometimes, I grew up, work was like, pick up a shovel, you dug a hole. That's work. What I do, I sometimes wonder is this work that I'm doing? I'm sitting here, I'm talking to you, I'm doing email, I'm on the phone, I'm having meetings. When I get to do something like, which I actually did get to do recently, pack up alpaca fleece that we're making into blankets for someone, I thought, okay, now I'm doing work. I'm packing it up. This is actual physical labor.

And of course, one of the things I love about the work that I do is that there's a substance to it. I can go touch that blanket. I can watch it being made. Sometimes, packing up fleece to send to the mill, I can participate in a little way. I love that. But a lot of the executive level work, all of it in fact, is not that. So I don't try to get too big a head there. I like to think what I do is important. I think it is for our company, but it's not more important than weaving those blankets and stitching them and dyeing the yarn.

Lisa Belisle: I think there's actually a corollary in healthcare, and even the work that I do now, which is that a lot of what I do now is in leadership and helping to move teams to maintain or improve patient care and quality experience. I'm not the one who's touching as many patients directly anymore, but there are different levels of work, different types of work, different creativity that's entailed. And one thing I've often thought about as a doctor is the touch of the patient, appropriate touch these days. It's kind of a weird thing to say, but to actually have that connection is very, very important. But a lot of the work that we do is intellectual work. A lot of the things that we do is communication and conversation and making decisions, which I think is similar to what you're describing in your role. But I love the idea of the tangible. I think we've gotten very far away from tangibility in this day and age. So much of what we do with the knowledge economy is kind of ephemeral. And so to have something that you can actually say, here is something that we did make, and it is for you to use for a very long time, and that ability to have something, well, it's not permanent, but it's more permanent than many things, that must be very satisfying.

Bill Laurita: I find it extremely satisfying. I really do. I've been doing this now for 20 years, and I get up every morning enthusiastic and ready to take on that challenge. I love it. I know it's not for everybody, but I feel very fortunate to have been able to create a life that is so much in sync with who I am at my essence. And a lot of it has to do with Maine, I think. Could this company exist in some other state? I somehow don't think so. There's something about that Maine mystique.

There is the design, but I don't think it's a crazy thing to say that the environment impacts the design and aesthetic and the look and the feel of things that are produced there. So I do think that there's something about what we do that is really Maine-centric. And then there's just the inspiration of the granite that's here and the salt air here on the coast and the dampness of the environment. And in our case, in Camden, the hills, some people call them mountains. They're not very tall, but they're beautiful. So the woods, the changing seasons, all of that, the earthiness of Maine, that's all in those blankets somehow.

Lisa Belisle: I also like the idea that these blankets embody the story of the people who create them and of the fibers. They contain that essence that you're describing, that then you can sort of lie underneath at night as you're advancing into slumber. So I think there is something that's also very special about that. And I know, in interviewing a lot of artists who are visual artists, that the story behind the work that they do is very important to the people who are buying art, in many cases.

Bill Laurita: Well, you might say it's everything. Because our blankets are very functional. There's a science behind why it's good to sleep under wool. It wicks moisture away from your body, and in that there's a little chemical reaction. It creates just a little bit of heat. So they are very functional, very comfortable to sleep under. But I'm not sure anyone buys a Swans Island blanket because they're cold. You do need that, right? But it is the story. It's how this came to be, what the meaning is in your life of this object. Because, let's be honest, these are very expensive products that I'm talking about now, the handwoven products. We have less expensive machine made items, but for these products, the length of time and the quality of the materials, we can't help but charge what we do. And believe me, our margins are not extreme by any long stretch of the imagination.

So in a certain sense, they're totems. What does this blanket say about me as a person? I bought this blanket, and in a certain way, I associate something about myself with that blanket. And of course, you can substitute many other objects for blanket here, the cars that we drive, for instance. So it does say something about who you are. You're an appreciator of fine craft. You love Maine. Perhaps you want beautiful, functional items in your life, and that matters to you. You're the kind of person for whom that matters. In my life, I want every object I have to have a story, from the corkscrew that I use to the lamp that I turn on in my home. Of course, my blankets, chairs. To me, that's the beauty of physical things, is how they make me feel. And so we try to do a lot of storytelling around these blankets.

And in our case, it's not a quote unquote story. It is literally all we need to do, because we know the farmers and we know where they come from, and the mills, and we weave them by hand and we dye them by hand and finish them by hand. We try to just tell that story. Here's where this came from. People do fall in love with it if they come to Northport. We have a store in Camden, we have a store in Northport. It's just up the road from Camden, where we have our studio, where we make the blankets. When people come in there, there's a good chance they're going to leave with a product. They have to drive there. It's on Route One, so it's not in a downtown. Or they come to the website. When they see the looms and we talk about how these are made, that's a much easier sale than on the web, for instance, where we try to convey that as well. But it's a website.

Lisa Belisle: I think there's a parallel with the work that I know, in talking to the Portland Art Gallery artists, that they do, and that it's starting from a place of story, and then it continues into a place of story. So the art that people purchase goes into their homes and it lives with them. And similarly, these blankets, they travel back to where people live and they cover the children. And sometimes the big fluffy golden retriever will lie on top of one of them, and they do become this sort of legacy object. I think that becomes a sense of a life lived.

Bill Laurita: Yes, absolutely. And not one, but more than one time, have people chosen to use our blankets as a death shroud. My partner thinks I'm morbid when I speak about this, but to me it really hearkens to how people feel about certain objects in their life, that in this case, I want to go out with this thing that has as much integrity as an object can have, an authenticity. And again, to go back to something I said earlier, we spoke about making a product with that much integrity and authenticity. It's very hard to marry that with, and it's not just me, I'm not just like a blanket artist just doing it, one person, get a commission, make a blanket. This is a company that we have. So you have many hands that go into a blanket. How do you take that thing that's that authentic, with that much intentionality, and have a company that, as I said, pays taxes and has to raise capital and plan and be concerned about cash flow and all those things? So that's a different kind of artistry, I guess you would say, than the actual blanket. But it's all part of our, in my mind anyway, these aren't separate atomistic aspects of one's life. This is one's, in my case, my life. That's the whole picture.

Lisa Belisle: Well, you're bringing me into your picture for at least some short period of time today.

Bill Laurita: Well, thank you very much. I've enjoyed our conversation, and it's nice to hear a little bit about your practice and what you're involved in.

Lisa Belisle: I'm Dr. Lisa Belisle. You have been listening to or watching Radio Maine, which is our video podcast, exploring and celebrating creativity and the human spirit, which is produced and sponsored by the Portland Art Gallery in Portland, Maine. Thanks again, Bill.

Bill Laurita: Thank you, Lisa.