A Handmade Life | Red House Bags in Burlington, Vermont

We had to go against everything we’d ever been told,” Britt Witt tells me, as we settle into a corner of the lofty Burlington, Vermont, studio that is home to Red House, the bag-making venture she runs with her husband, Matt. 

I’m listening, but I’m distracted. The walls are lined with elegant, minimalist waxed canvas bags for every conceivable purpose: book bags, day bags, weekenders. Plus lunch bags, rucksacks, and beach totes. The colors—ash gray, oak brown, vintage red—are gorgeous. I peek inside: They’re lined with real French ticking. Irresistible. I want to hold that cross-body day bag, adjust the Horween leather strap that Matt cut a few hours ago, and take it out for a spin.

In 2010, the Witts left their native Arizona and moved to Vermont with their two children. Matt had never been here; Britt had visited once, for three months, after high school. “I stayed in a tiny red house heated with a woodstove,” she remembers. “I’d never done anything like that, but I feel like it imprinted a little of what was meant to be. I just wasn’t ready yet.” She pauses. “I had to go find Matt, even though I didn’t know that’s what I was doing.”

They’d known each other since middle school, and though they went their separate ways they’d stayed in touch. The day he got his acceptance letter to Hebrew University in Israel, she called and asked if he wanted to go with her to the Pacific Northwest instead.

“We ran off together for a while,” he says with a grin.

“Forever, really,” she says.

They eventually settled in Scottsdale, bought a house, and started a family. Matt used his education in classical history and ancient languages to … work in sales. But a few years in, he says, “we really started to feel uncomfortable with who we were becoming.”

“I wanted a red house with a woodstove on my own terms,” Britt says. “I’d gotten a glimpse of it, and I wanted to share that with Matt.”

It was, Matt says, “an intuition that Vermont was the place” that brought them east, with no job prospects and little money, after the housing bubble burst. “It was like stripping ourselves down and lighting things on fire in order to sit in the ashes and say, OK, now what?”

Britt concedes that the idea of the little red house “went right out the window” as they found themselves jammed into a tiny loft in the middle of Shelburne. But slowly, sparks began to ignite. Britt found work with a jewelry maker, who encouraged her to get creative, start her own business. “Then someone asked me to sew a toiletry bag,” she says.

From that point, everything Britt created came out of a need, each item leading them toward the handmade life they’d envisioned. Matt needed a wood carrier; she made one. Someone wanted a bigger lunchbox, so she made it larger—and when Matt suggested adding handles, it became a book bag (now their best-seller).

“Waxed canvas came into it because I wasn’t used to dealing with inclement weather in the desert,” she says. “I was enthralled by this material that was waterproof.” The French ticking was accidental (she had first spotted the rugged mattress-cover material in a shop in England), but “as soon as I lined a canvas bag with it, I knew—this was it.”

Matt was crafting leather handles and straps in the evenings and on weekends, dreaming of leaving his job as a network engineer and coming on full time, but Britt confesses, “In the back of my mind I was thinking that’ll never happen. There’s no way this could pay all our bills.”

In 2015, a local news station did a “Made in Vermont” holiday show featuring Red House. It was five days before Christmas, and they’d been working nonstop, filling orders. “We’re in our house, we look like hell, we’re very tired, and it was quite funny,” Matt says. For some reason, they thought the segment would air in January; instead, they learned, it was running that same night. “I was like, Well, who watches the local news?” Britt says. “We got 80 orders in 24 hours.”

A few months later, Matt quit his job. By 2017, they were ready to make the move to a bigger space, and relocated to Burlington’s Chace Mill. In this life together, they set every rivet, cut every handle, and stitch every stitch on their bags. “People say to us, ‘You’ve got such a great brand—how’d you build it?’” says Matt. “I think we were building a brand before we knew what a brand was.”

And the red house? Well, one day they heard about a beautiful home for sale, down the street from their small Shelburne loft. It was part of the Lake Champlain Housing Trust, which made it affordable for Shelburne. “It was waiting,” says Britt. And I know before she tells me. A red house with a woodstove.

She nods. “That’s the life we wanted.”

For more information or to buy online, go to redhousevt.com.