About
LONG STORY SHORT...
Left Grain is a design studio in Noblesville, Indiana that manufactures goods for independent retailers and businesses and has a gift shop attached to the studio.
SHORT STORY LONG...
Left Grain is a design and manufacturing studio based in Noblesville, Indiana, best known for leather patch hats and small-batch goods designed with intention. Every product starts as original artwork. Each piece is hand-drawn or illustrated, designed and engraved in-house before it becomes a hat, a keychain, or a keepsake worth holding onto.
We're a working studio: designing, producing, and shipping small-batch goods for people and businesses who care about quality over quantity. From custom logo hats for breweries and wineries to licensed collegiate goods to gifts that actually mean something, everything we make is Midwest-made, thoughtfully produced, and built to last.
The name Left Grain nods to two things: our love of natural materials—real leather, wood grain, hand-dyed finishes—and the fact that our founder and her husband are both left-handed makers. It's also a wink at "left brain," because around here, design and craft aren't separate disciplines. They're the same job.
At its core, Left Grain is a small studio with big standards: original design, real materials, low minimums, and production that happens right here on Maple Ave in the historic downtown of Noblesville, Indiana. Our space has a cool history too.
In 2022, we moved Left Grain's manufacturing into the garage on Maple Ave in downtown Noblesville. It was meant to be a production space. We have our design tables, presses, engraving equipment, the actual work of making things. But downtown Noblesville has a retail culture that's hard to ignore, storefronts full of local makers and shop owners who've built something worth walking into. We didn't want to just sit behind that. We wanted to be part of it.
So we opened the front of our space as a shop...
It gave us a way to be in the neighborhood, not just near it—a place for people to walk in, see the studio at work, and take something home that was made a few feet from where they're standing. It also gave us room to do something we didn't have an obvious excuse for otherwise: make things because we wanted to make them. The shop is where new ideas get tested before they're ready for wholesale or full production, where the smaller, stranger, more fun pieces live—the ones that don't fit a client brief but still deserve to exist.
It's still a working studio first. But now it's one you can walk into.
Whether you're outfitting a team, stocking a boutique, or looking for a gift with a story, you're getting work from a studio that takes it seriously.
Find us on Instagram, Facebook, or TikTok (and Pinterest too!)
— Kim
Owner + Designer
Left Grain
See more of my artwork at thekimdavis.com.
MORE ABOUT KIM
Kim Davis is the founder and creative director of Left Grain. She holds a degree in Computer Graphics Technology from Purdue University and a Master's in Educational Technology, and has worked as a professional photographer since 2007. That combination of design training, an eye for image-making, and a background in building things that teach and communicate clearly shapes how she approaches every product Left Grain makes.
Her work starts as original illustration: often hand-drawn, often inspired by everyday moments, local pride, and the kind of small details most people walk past. From there, those drawings get engineered into physical products. They are engraved, dyed, and assembled in-house at the studio on Maple Ave. Left Grain is best known for leather patch hats, but the same process runs through everything the studio produces: design first, materials second, product last.
Kim built Left Grain on a simple premise: good design shouldn't be reserved for mass production, and small-batch shouldn't mean amateur. By keeping design and manufacturing under one roof, she's able to hold the line between the original artwork and the finished piece, so nothing gets lost in translation between the two.
Beyond running the studio, Kim is active in the local creative and small business community, and continues to shoot photography and take on design work outside of Left Grain. Her focus, at the studio and beyond, stays the same: work that holds up, made by people who take the process seriously...and have fun doing it.