BEN THOMPSON: CHARLIE MIDDLETON – Wine Time With Mitch

Ben Thompson loved woodwork at school and decided a carpentry apprenticeship would be a logical career choice. But the reality was quite different.

“In the end, I worked out that I like making things but not building houses,” he tells Australian Life.

So, after some manual work to pay the bills, he moved into the fitness industry as a sales rep.

“At my second day at the company, I realised this wasn’t for me and I thought, ‘My God, what have I done?’ I needed something else to do,” he says.

In 2002, he started a Sydney-made clothing label as a side project with a mate: El Cato. The duo started off with T-shirts, denim, sweats and streetwear. He needed a belt for himself, so he set about working out how to make one.

“I went and did a little class at a leather place in Sydney where you could make a small piece on a Saturday. It turned out my carpentry skills translated really well to leather products. I didn’t need to learn how to talk; I just needed to learn a new language. That’s how I describe the process,” he says.

El Cato was still going strong when the early seeds of his now-iconic label, Charlie Middleton, started to bloom.

“My female friends and customers wanted me to make women’s waist belts in soft leather, and I kept refusing. But things change when you have to pay bills. I thought, ‘Okay, I am now making belts,’” he laughs.

Soon, half the product range became belts, so he added bags to help the business along. Because he couldn’t sew yet, he would design and glue the pieces together, then hire a professional leather worker to stitch them. In 2009, he purchased equipment from a belt maker who was closing down. He now had the right sewing machine for leather goods and started experimenting with the entire process himself.

“Very quickly my designs became simple because I was doing them myself. This period really shaped our designs,” he explains.

Charlie, his childhood dog, and Middleton, a street he lived on during the 1990s, provided the inspiration for the brand name, which began as an old Hotmail address.

“It was such a good name and I thought I would use it. I had no idea I would be stuck with it 20 years later,” he says.

He went from selling at the Bondi and Paddington markets to supplying independent stockists, launching an online store and eventually opening his flagship retail space on Bondi Road at Bondi Beach in 2016. Here, he brought the workshop and retail shop together.

“Then people could see what we were doing first-hand. I have lived in Bondi and it seemed like a good place to stay,” he says.

“If you make things to last ten years, you hardly see any problems. So, quality is so important and a foundational thing with the business. Simply, you don’t want to have people return a product,” he says.

Ben is now focusing on achieving more of a work-life balance. The storefront in Bondi has recently closed, and Bowral, in the New South Wales Southern Highlands, is the brand’s new home alongside its highly popular online boutique.

“I am actually wanting to go a little bit smaller and make a few more interesting things,” he explains.

The late, great Sir Donald Bradman and Charlie Middleton—Bowral is full of Aussie icons.