Blue Mallee Outdoor Products

About Us

So ... a little bit about us and how we got started.That's a picture of the family (to the right) at Larks Quarry, Queensland in 2007. There's Peter (Dad), Stephanie (then 6yo), Henry (then 4yo) and me, Vivienne. If you look in the bottom left of the picture you can see that I'm carrying the very original Handy Bag (it's pale grey with a black trim).

That bag! Somehow I thought it was pretty good - I've still got it, I noticed it hanging on a door knob the other day - oh my goodness, it's a shocker! It was a great idea but, the sewing was dodgy (I still hadn't got used to the machine and the speed of it), the stitching was white on black, which was wobbly on the grey ... but I dragged it around Queensland on our five week camping trip. The friends we were travelling with said the right things (yes, they're good friends!), goodness knows what they were actually thinking. But in the scheme of things, I kept going and here we are today.

Back to the start

Way back in 1999, Peter turned 40. We were living in Dubbo, NSW at the time renovating a very old, 'original condition' house. So, in collusion with my mother I bought Peter a Triton workbench. Mum lived in Bathurst at the time so bought the 'secret Triton' for me (yes, I did pay her back), she delivered it to Dubbo on a visit and I had to 'hide' it in a friends garage until the day. Peter was very surprised and very excited when he released his gift from the garage. It had a thorough workout that day and has been well used ever since.

My 40th was in 2007 before our big Queensland camping trip. We heard of an industrial sewing machine that was for sale. Peter organised to buy the machine for my birthday. OK, it's not quite a trip to Paris - but I was excited!

I made the kids swags for the trip. I made a roof top bag for the car (that fitted our roof rack exactly). I made a fly for our 25 year old tent - out of old tents that we picked up at a recycling place, it was made of a mish mash of coloured canvas but looked kind of cute and worked really well. Then, between us Peter and I came up with all sorts of projects before the trip - a pole bag, peg bag, camp oven bag, the original toolbag (which has seen various incarnations to get to its current design), and also a carry bag to carry kids craft stuff for the trip (this was the origins of the work bag). The machine well and truly paid for itself.

Over the next couple of years and after numerous 'maybe I should make bags and sell them' and 'it would be good to have a business from home' and 'I wonder if I could sell these bags' we must have had a lightbulb moment. At some stage, and we're not sure whose suggestion it was, we decided to start Blue Mallee Outdoor Products.

We started with four styles - Handy Bag, Work Bag, Tool Bag and Stuff Bag. We've since added the Satchel (after requests from people for a deeper Work Bag) and the Firewood sling (again, after a couple of requests from people, which we thought was a really good idea).

So, since February 2009 we've been selling our bags at various markets and we've been accessible through the internet - you can email or phone us. We've had a really positive response from people. We get some great feedback, especially at markets.

If you want to find us, check out our Markets page where we list all of the upcoming locations where you can find Blue Mallee.