On the Past and the Future

The Story to This Point

As many of your know, my father, Hal, passed away suddenly on December 21st, 2024. He had suffered from a bout of anaplasmosis, a tick-borne disease, in 2023, and it damaged his heart to the point that it finally (and very suddenly) stopped one bitterly cold day just before Christmas. He died in the front yard. 

My father in one of the best photos I ever took of him.

What followed was the most catastrophically stressful, harrowingly unpleasant nineteen months of my life. I won't get into all of the ugly details, but a short list of some of the merriment includes nearly being killed twice, having to euthanize both of his dogs within four days of each other, frozen pipes, and disposing of Dad's overwhelming estate. 

That last part is important. I grew up in an unfinished house. When I say "unfinished," I mean "most of the walls were concrete block, you can see every ceiling rafter, and the only heat available is a wood-burning stove. There is no back-up." The house really only remained habitable because of my father's efforts to keep it running while I worked with my mother to steer and grow the business. My mother left another job to run Barrister and Mann with me, and I always lived in fear that, if I were to leave the place without having some kind of plan for someone else to take over production, the damage to my parents' lives would be irreparable.

As it turned out, that's not as crazy as it might sound.

At the end of his life, my father's mental health had deteriorated severely. He had spent the last thirteen years in agonizing pain, the result of a botched ankle surgery, and had developed extreme hoarding tendencies. Mom and I did what we could to keep it in check, but, as he got worse, he hoarded more and more tools, bits of wood, and various other things until the house, barn, and several storage containers were full of it all. After he died, we were faced with the enormous task of disposing of everything.

You may ask yourself, "Why not just have someone come in and clean it all out?" And, for much of it, we did. But there were certain things that were important and could not simply be discarded. My father's workbench, which he had milled himself from rock maple cut from the forests around the house. His carving chisels. Photos. Important things from my childhood. It was not a simple matter of just having everything thrown out.

The upper floor of my childhood home after nearly everything but my father's bench had been removed.

You may wonder why I'm telling you all of this. After all, why should you care? Because I've begun to receive emails that seem to indicate that folks think that I'm not trying hard enough. That Barrister and Mann's struggles with production and stock are the result of my no longer caring about the company's operations or its future. So I'm trying to set the record straight: this is not the result of any of those things. I have done what I could to keep the company functional, but I have also been working with my mother, mostly just the two of us, to dispose of what my father left behind before the ~130 acres that my parents owned were sold.

That has now come and gone. It's done. We finished it last Sunday, July 19th, at about 8pm. Nineteen months of hell, of running back and forth between Upstate NY and Massachusetts, a 500 mile, 8 hour round trip, every few days to help my mother keep cleaning, keep working. Make no mistake: Mom handled the bulk of it. But it was such an overwhelmingly colossal task that it took us over a year and a half to handle everything, to sell my father's tools (including a massive tractor and a 27 foot wood mill), scatter his ashes, and deal with what was left. And all of this had to be done while keeping Barrister and Mann at least partly functional, which is a full-time job all on its own.

But it's over. And this is what comes next.

Looking Ahead

First and foremost, for all of our European customers who have waited extremely patiently, I'm coordinating with Stirling to get production underway to complete our order for the EU. This includes several LE fragrances, and I expect this to take only a few weeks to complete. 

Second, we will be undertaking a full restock, including splashes, missing shaving soaps, bar soaps, aftershave balms, and colognes. 

• Aftershave balms are being moved to glass jars instead of pump bottles. So many people had issues with the pumps failing that I've decided to deal with this in the simplest and most elegant way possible. The jars and material are already sitting at Stirling; I have to complete a label redesign so that we can get these ready for sale, which I'm working on over the next few days.
• Colognes will be restocked in full. I've been waiting for an order for bottles after the tariffs drove the price of bottles from our previous supplier up to to the point where they were no longer commercially viable. I have now located a new supplier and we have 1,000 bottles on their way as we speak. All of our colognes will be restocked as soon as possible.
• Aftershave splashes will be restocked shortly. I have 400 kilos of splash stock currently sitting at Stirling, which is just shy of 4,000 bottles' worth. Much of this is going to the EU, but the rest will be bottled and sent to fulfillment in the next couple of weeks.
• Shaving soaps are a little wobbly, but we're getting there. Despite the chaos that has surrounded our operations since February, we have undergone the fastest product turnover in Barrister and Mann history, and we've all but run out of jars (for reference, this is roughly 12,000 units). It's unheard-of for us to blow through material so quickly, so I have an order for a new production run already in with our supplier, which will take about six weeks to arrive. We have enough to hold us until then.
• Shaving soap samples are coming. We have several fragrances, including Seville, curing at Stirling and ready for packaging. We should have them again soon.
• Bar soaps take a while to make because they have to cure for a month, but I'll be getting materials down to Stirling to restock all of them as quickly as I can.
• The Sessions Series that I have discussed previously in other places, four fragrances themed around some of my favorite blues musicians, will be coming shortly as shaving soap and splash. If they prove to be popular, they'll get the full treatment and will get balms and colognes as well. Because of packaging limitations, they'll be offered in white jars for the first run.
• Berceuse fragrances will be returning to production as soon as I can set up a chill-filtering system here in MA. I have been aging both Allegretto 7.2 and Minneapolis 5.3 for several years at this point, and have several gallons of them both, so it's just a matter of getting them bottled and shipped.

Much of the hold-up is due to the fact that I am still compounding all of the raw fragrance myself in the basement of our house in Massachusetts. I'm working on a way of scaling this up, since I am very much the bottleneck, so that shouldn't be an issue for much longer.

As for various limited-edition fragrances, for the most part, I'm focusing on getting our regular catalog back into production. That means that I'm mostly not working on new fragrances for Barrister and Mann or on restoring most of our past LE releases. However, one of the few exceptions is Leviathan, which will return to production in September as it always does, and will be available in the EU as well.

Notably, there will be no Halloween launch this year, for the first time in Barrister and Mann's history. After the disastrous release in 2025, where various factors caused many orders to arrive months late, I have opted to focus on restoring the company to full operation rather than on what has become an almost comically unlucky annual release. More than that, I have no wish to put the folks at Stirling through the same headache, and so Halloween is going to remain quiet for 2026. I hope to have something new for 2027. 

I'm very much aware that this is a lot of material to drop all at once. While I cannot answer blog comments directly because Shopify is stupid and has no such functionality, please feel free to reach out to me through our contact form. I'll get back to you as soon as I'm able.