Every company has an origin story. Ours fits in a backpack.
Years ago, travelling through Southeast Asia, I wandered into a small shop in Kuta, Lombok — more a weaver's front room than a store, with hammocks stacked in bright piles and a loom working in the back. I bought a handwoven hammock for what amounted to pocket change, rolled it up, and carried it home to Canada as a gift for my dad.
That hammock should have been a souvenir. Instead, it became the longest-serving piece of furniture our family has ever owned. Summer after summer it hung outside — sun, rain, kids, visitors, more weight than it was ever rated for — and it simply refused to quit. The store-bought outdoor gear around it faded, frayed, and went to the landfill. The handmade one stayed soft, stayed strong, and stayed hung.
That's the lesson Slack Tide is built on: a hammock woven by hand, by someone who learned the craft from the generation before them, isn't really a product. It's closer to an heirloom that happens to be comfortable.
Why we sell the way we do
When we started Slack Tide in Nanoose Bay, on Vancouver Island, we made a few promises to ourselves. First: every hammock we sell is genuinely handmade by a named maker — Maya weavers in the Yucatán, artisans in Bali, Brazil, and Nicaragua — never anonymous factory stock with a logo slapped on. Second: every design gets hung between the cedars at our place and tested by us before it earns a listing. Third: honest ship windows, honest materials, and a simple rule — if we wouldn't hand it to our own family, we don't sell it to yours.
Our signature hammock, The Matrimonial, is the closest thing we've found to that Lombok original: woven by Maya families who have made hammocks for generations, in a place where the hammock isn't patio furniture — it's the bed, the crib, and the couch, perfected over centuries.
The name? On the coast, the slack tide is the still moment between ebb and flow — work done, light going gold, nowhere to be. That's where a hammock lives. That's where we live, too.
Read the longer version on Our Story page — and if you pick up a hammock from us, know that it started with a weaver, not a warehouse. Handwoven to be handed down.