A supply company built on long phone calls and short catalogs.

How we got here

Steve grew up helping his mother run a small gift store outside of Boerne, Texas. The store carried a little bit of everything — ceramics from the nearby college kilns, towels from a textile mill two counties over, jam from a neighbor who labeled jars by hand. The shop closed in 2014, but the way it worked never quite left him.

When he started Ajnas Traders five years later, the goal was simple: be the wholesaler his mother had always wished she had. Pick up the phone. Photograph every product the way it actually looks. Keep the catalog tight enough that nothing on it is an afterthought. Ship things in kraft paper, not styrofoam. Remember which shops have a slow January and don't pester them in January.

We've grown carefully since then. Two warehouse employees, a part-time photographer, and a roster of small American makers we've been working with since the very beginning. We turn down more new accounts than we take on — not out of exclusivity, but because we'd rather serve 120 shops well than 600 poorly.

What we believe

Wholesale is mostly a service business pretending to be a product business. Anyone can move boxes. What's rare is a supplier who answers on the second ring, who knows your buying cycle, who will walk a damaged pallet back to the dock without making it your problem. That's the part we work hardest on.

We also believe in slowing down where it counts. Every one of our product photos is taken in-house on the same light table. Every order is checked by hand before it ships. It would be cheaper to outsource both — and almost everyone does — but those two details are the most common reasons our partners tell us they stay.