A small workshop, one collar at a time

Constroll is small, and deliberately so. There’s no warehouse and no third party quietly making these somewhere else. When you order something, we cut it, finish it, check it and post it ourselves.

How it started

Katie started making collars while she was on maternity leave, which is a polite way of saying she started making collars at eleven at night with a baby monitor next to her.

It began because she wanted one for her own dog and couldn’t find it. Everything was either well made and severe-looking, or lovely and held together with glue and plated hardware that went green after a winter. Leather looked the part and then went stiff and cracked once it had been soaked a few times. We wanted something that would look right on a scruffy dog in a muddy field and still be going in five years.

That search is what led us to BioThane, and to a lot of ruined offcuts learning to work it properly. The first one was honestly not very good. The fourth one was, and people in the park kept asking where it came from – which is roughly when this stopped being a hobby.

How they’re made

Everything starts as premium BioThane: a polyester webbing core with a waterproof coating bonded over it. It has the strength of the webbing inside and a surface that shrugs off water, mud and river swims. It doesn’t soak, doesn’t rot, doesn’t hold the smell of a wet dog, and wipes clean with a damp cloth.

Every piece is then cut, finished and checked by hand, one at a time. That is the part that takes minutes rather than seconds, and it is why each one gets looked at properly before it goes in an envelope.

The hardware is solid cast brass or stainless steel – never plated alloy. Plating looks identical in a photograph and wears through at the contact points after a couple of years of rain and river swims. Solid brass just goes darker and warmer instead. It’s most of the reason our collars cost what they do.

We work in small batches, in Newport, South Wales, mostly in the evenings. Nothing is made before you order it, which is why there’s a 3–5 working day wait – the BioThane is still on the roll when your order comes in.

What we won’t do

We won’t tell you a collar will stop your dog pulling, because no collar does that. We won’t put a fake countdown on the basket. And we won’t sell you something that isn’t right for your dog – if a harness suits you better, we’d genuinely rather tell you that than take the order.

If you email us, you get the person who made it. Usually the same day, occasionally the next if it’s been a bad night.

– Katie