Makers

Sample

Based: Beaverton, Oregon · Status: active · Founded by: Dan Matsuda

About

The carry brand of designer Dan Matsuda, who was a product designer at Triple Aught Design from 2006 to 2018 and now builds in small batches in Beaverton, Oregon.
Its products are named by an "Article" numbering convention — Article 404, Article 252, Article_017. **Article is not a product line, and Sample is not one either: Sample is the brand, Article is how its models are numbered.** This project's founding brief described "SAMPLE and ARTICLE lines" as two parallel lines; that is wrong, and encoding it would have misrepresented the maker to readers who know better. The correction is left visible rather than quietly applied; Carryology's interview, cited below, describes the numbering system.
The legacy domain danmatsuda.com is now a landing page pointing at the Sample store.

Packs tracked (1)

• Article 404C, 18 L (1 known gap)

What we don't know

Things we looked for and did not find. On the questions people most want answered, the sources are often silent — and that silence is recorded rather than filled with a plausible sentence.

• Founding year of the brand: not stated on any page we read.
• Most individual Article models (441, 498–501, and the historical 252 and 017) are unverified; only Article 404C was read in full.

Sources

• Sample — Sample (primary)
• Dan Matsuda: a New World of EDC — Carryology (secondary). Confirms the TAD tenure 2006–2018 and describes the 'Article' numbering system.

Sample's own site — each cited page fetched once by an AI agent, never crawled, never on a schedule. See how the data was collected.