WE ARE THE FUTURE OF TRADITION
WOOX builds premium outdoor tools where natural walnut meets modern engineering.
Our products are made to feel right in the hand, perform in the field, and earn their place over time. Every stock, chassis, piece of furniture, knife, and axe begins with a simple belief: traditional materials still have a future when they are engineered with precision and finished by skilled hands.
Our roots go back to northern Italy, where the Minelli family has worked wood since 1937. Today, that same mindset continues in Hickory, North Carolina— a place with its own deep woodworking legacy.
This is where Italian craft tradition meets American material, American shooters, and a new generation of American hands.
1937 - BERGAMO, ITALY
OUR ITALIAN ROOTS
On January 13, 1937, Francesco Minelli opened a woodworking workshop in Bergamo, in the foothills of the Italian Alps. He was not building a brand. He was practicing a craft - specifically, the craft of working walnut at the highest level available.
THE WORKSHOP
That workshop is the source of everything WOOX makes today. Four generations of the Minelli family have worked the same material, in the same tradition, passing what they learned to the next person in the workshop. Not nostalgia or aesthetics.
A specific, transferable body of knowledge: how to read a grain, how to select against checking, how to oil without raising the figure, how the material responds to temperature and humidity over decades.
THE DECISION THE INDUSTRY DID NOT MAKE
When precision chassis manufacturers moved to polymer - lighter, cheaper, easier to manufacture at scale - WOOX went deeper into wood. This was a craft conviction: that walnut, properly engineered, performs at the level of the most demanding applications. That a material which improves with use is superior to a material that depreciates. That the wood-aluminum bond competitors attempted and abandoned was worth solving.
We solved it. No one else has the craft history to have done that. No one else can claim it now.
HICKORY, NORTH CAROLINA — WHERE THE CRAFT STILL MATTERS
WOOX finishes and fulfills in Hickory, North Carolina, a region once known as one of America’s great centers of furniture and woodworking. That history matters.
For decades, this area was built around wood: workshops, furniture makers, machine operators, finishers, suppliers, and families whose skills were tied to the material. Then much of that industry was hit hard. North Carolina’s furniture manufacturing industry lost more than half of its jobs between 1999 and 2009 as lower-cost imports reshaped the market.
Catawba County, where Hickory is located, had more than 43,400 manufacturing jobs in 1990. By 2019, that number had fallen to about 23,500 — a decline of nearly 20,000 jobs.
That is the context behind what we are building. WOOX is growing in a place where this craft was almost lost.
We are not trying to bring back low-cost mass production. That is not our path. We are building something different: high-value outdoor products, finished in Hickory, shaped by Italian woodworking heritage, and made for American shooters, hunters, ranchers, and outdoorsmen.
It is hard work. It is not perfect. But it can be done.And every product we finish here is part of that proof.
(Watch how it comes to life below)
WE BUILT IT, WE STAND BEHIND IT.
Backed by The Craftsman’s Stand: no-questions-asked returns, manufacturer defect replacement, blade refurbishment, and direct access to our gunsmiths—before and long after your build leaves the bench.
30 days to change your mind. For life, we stand behind it—if it fails, we make it right; if you break it, we’ll still help.