Gabriel Hargett grew up on Mobile Bay, in Point Clear, where the daily schedule was bikes, fishing piers and whatever the water offered. Today he runs a leather manufacturing company in Asheville, North Carolina, that supplies national brands — and the through-line between the bay and the workshop is more direct than it looks: both reward people who like fixing things.
Hargett is the founder of Oowee Products, a leather goods company that started in 2009 with a pint glass and a pile of leather scraps, and has grown into a 17-employee operation selling custom leather products in three markets: direct to consumers, wholesale and the corporate promotional-products industry. The company averaged 20 percent annual growth for its first decade and grew 40 percent last year.
From Mobile Bay to the mountains
A native Mobilian who spent his childhood on the water at Point Clear, Hargett was the kid who was always fixing bikes or rigging something for a fishing trip. After high school, he and his twin sister Christina enrolled at Brevard College, in the small western North Carolina town that sits at the edge of Pisgah National Forest and bills itself as a hub for outdoor adventure. Christina stayed and earned her degree in wilderness and experiential education. Gabriel didn’t — he left for Asheville, found work in one of the city’s many bicycle shops, and started riding the region’s legendary mountain bike trails.
The detour that built the business came through prosthetics. A prosthetics manufacturer recruited him away from the bike shop, a natural transition for someone who understood how high-end bike components were made — the same precision hardware goes into both. The job mattered for another reason: prosthetics manufacturing uses a lot of leather, and there was always scrap material around.
Hargett brought a few scraps home to the basement workshop of the fixer-upper house he’d bought, and started experimenting. The result was a leather sleeve for a pint glass. Asheville was then exploding as a craft beer mecca, and breweries started ordering sleeves faster than he could make them. In 2009, at 26, he left his day job and founded Oowee Products. The original pint sleeve is patented and remains one of the company’s biggest sellers.
Seventeen employees and sixty products
What began as one product is now more than 60, counting variations, most of it aimed at the corporate and incentive market: custom logo leather goods for client gifts, employee recognition and awards, sold through nationwide specialty advertising companies. The client list reads like a national retailer directory — Pendleton Whiskey, Budweiser, L.L. Bean, Ace Hardware and Cannoli Tools, plus a recent large order of leather logo patch hats for Jimmy John’s sandwich shops.
The company also runs a busy direct-to-consumer e-commerce business through its website, Amazon and Etsy — personalized wallets, belts and gifts for weddings, graduations and Father’s Day — and since 2019 a growing wholesale arm that has signed a couple hundred brick-and-mortar accounts, including Mast General Stores and Ace Hardware stores across the region.
“We get email orders all day long,” Hargett says. His current obsession is streamlining order processing to keep up. Growth has been deliberate and organic — three employees at the start, 17 full-time today. “We are still a small business. We’ve always grown organically.”
The space has grown with the company. After outgrowing his basement, Hargett leased his first real space in 2011 in an old Burlington factory converted into a business park on the French Broad River, moved twice within the building, then purchased a 4,500-square-foot building in 2018. He has already outgrown it and is scouting the next move.
The partnership that built the company
The most consequential decision Oowee ever made had nothing to do with leather. In 2011, Hargett contacted the Autism Society of North Carolina about employing adults on the autism spectrum, and the partnership has shaped the company ever since. The nonprofit provides transportation and an on-site job coach; Oowee provides steady manufacturing work for a population that faces some of the highest unemployment rates in the country.
“I can’t say enough good things about our partnership with the Autism Society,” Hargett says. “We provide employment for an underappreciated community of adults with autism that needs jobs and often has a very difficult time finding employment.”
Reliable, well-supported employees allowed the company to buy better equipment and expand its product line — growth that Hargett credits directly to the partnership. “I prefer to invest in people,” he says. “It’s been an unbelievable relationship and I try to support the Autism Society every way I can.”
Three markets, one workshop
Today Oowee fills orders daily that range from a single custom wallet for a birthday to thousands of branded items for a retail chain. Bulk custom orders ship in three to five weeks; individual retail orders turn around in about a week. The company attended three of the country’s largest promotional-products trade shows in January alone.
Hargett is deliberate about what growth means. “My next challenge is to work on our order processing to streamline and make it more efficient,” he says — not to chase scale for its own sake. The company has never taken outside investment and has never had a layoff; the model has been steady reinvestment in people and machines since the basement days.
The bay never left
For all the miles between Asheville and Point Clear, the coast remains central to Hargett’s identity. He returns as often as he can with his partner Jamie and his son Weston, visiting family and friends, casting net for bait and pulling crabs off pilings. “Mobile Bay and the Gulf Coast is a big part of me,” he says. “It’s good for the mind and the soul.”
He remains a student of the water — tides, weather, the patience that fishing teaches. “What the Mobile River Delta has to offer is amazing,” he says. “The coastal area is a special place.”
Thirteen years after a stack of leather scraps turned into a company, Oowee Products stands as a quiet argument for a particular kind of entrepreneurship: grow when you can, hire people others overlook, make a physical product well, and never forget the water that made you.