About Forge & Anvil
We are not a lifestyle brand.
We are a shop for people who have one.
Forge & Anvil was founded by Daniel Wheeler in 2026, after two decades of mobile welding and fabrication work along the Virginia coast. This is a marketplace built the way a good shop is built: you vet the people, you check the work, you only put your name on what you would use yourself.
The Origin
Real work. Real makers. A marketplace built by someone who knows the difference.
Daniel Wheeler runs a mobile welding and fabrication shop out of Newport News, Virginia. He works up and down the Hampton Roads corridor — Norfolk, Chesapeake, Virginia Beach, Williamsburg, the Eastern Shore — fixing the heavy equipment and pipelines that keep real work moving. Custom aluminum, structural repair, CNC plasma cutting, and a lot of Sunday-afternoon rescues of the guys who keep other guys working.
Twenty years of that will teach you a few things. You learn to tell a real maker from a guy selling someone else's work. You learn what actually lasts in a shop environment and what falls apart in the first month. You learn that the people making the best stuff in America are often running one-person operations out of a two-car garage, and the reason you have never heard of them is because they are busy making things, not selling themselves.
So Daniel started Forge & Anvil. Not as another apparel label, not as another dropshipper, but as a curated marketplace for the makers he would buy from himself. Knives, leather, steelwork, wood, tools, small-batch mechanical goods. Every maker vetted, every product something you would actually use.
A portion of every sale goes back into the trade. Maker Grants help the next generation of craftspeople get their shops open. Scholarships put working people through trade school. The people on this site are the people keeping American craft alive, and our job is to send more money their way and bring more people up behind them.
What We Stand For
Four things we won't compromise on.
Handmade, not drop-shipped
Every product on the site is made by the person listed as the maker. No white-label factories, no rebrands of overseas goods, no quiet middlemen. If a piece was made in someone's shop, we name the shop.
Made in the United States
Every maker on the marketplace is an American shop or a US-based craftsperson. Raw materials come from US suppliers where the supply chain allows it, and we name the suppliers on the product page when it matters.
Proceeds fund the trade
A portion of every sale goes to Maker Grants (helping craftspeople launch their shops) and to our scholarship trust (sending working people to welding and trade school). Growth for us means more makers funded.
Daniel vets every maker
Before a maker lists on this site, Daniel has reviewed their work, talked to them about their process, and decided the craftsmanship meets the bar. If something ever fails under normal use, we make it right. No arguments.
By the Numbers
A small shop, doing real work.
We launched in 2026. We're still small, and we plan to stay that way. Growth for its own sake is how brands become the thing they were supposed to replace.
Vetted makers
Scholarships funded
Donated to trade schools
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