Four Women, One Mission: The Story of Womanswork
By Heather Cameron Hall, Owner & President
Designed by women, for women who garden, work, and create.
Every pair of gloves and every tool on this site carries more history in it than most people realize. Womanswork didn't start as a plan to build a "brand." It started in the fall of 1985 in southwestern Maine, when Karen Rowantree Smiley hit her last straw.
"It was the last straw," Karen told a reporter not long after, describing an afternoon spent struggling to work in a pair of bulky, ill-fitting men's work gloves — the only kind available to her at the time. So she and her husband, attorney Larry Horowitz, decided to fix it themselves: build gardening and work gloves sized and shaped for a woman's hand, instead of a men's small with a flower printed on it.
Karen put the mission right on the label. Every pair carried the original Womanswork logo: strong women building a gentle world. It wasn't just a tagline — she meant it literally. As the company grew, she began donating a percentage of profits to nonprofits that help women heal from violence, tying the business directly back to the words on its own gloves.
The idea caught on fast. Within a couple of years, Womanswork's story had been picked up by USA Today, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Yankee Magazine, Mother Earth News, and Venture, among others. Karen later wrote that she'd received "countless letters of support and appreciation from women from all walks of life." Turns out a lot of women had been fighting the same bulky, wrong-sized gloves for years — they just needed someone to finally build the right ones.
That idea — that women doing hard, physical, outdoor work deserved tools built for them, not around them — turned out to have staying power. More than forty years later, it's still the whole reason we exist.
A company handed from woman to woman
What I love most about Womanswork's history is that it hasn't just been about strong women. It's been run by them, one after another, each one trusted to carry it forward.
After Karen built the foundation, Nancy Bennett Phillips took the reins in the late 1990s, running the company from York, Maine, through the early 2000s. From there, Dorian Rogers Winslow took over in May 2000 and spent the next twenty-six years growing Womanswork into the brand so many of you know today — expanding the product line to include the print collections our customers know and love, and deepening relationships with garden centers and retailers across the country.
In 2023, Dorian brought Womanswork into 1% for the Planet — in a lot of ways, a return to what Karen started back in 1985. We give 1% of our sales back, and we're deliberate about where it goes: we carefully choose organizations that support women in the very world they tend, whether that's a garden, a farm, or a coastline. You can read more about who we support and why, right here on the Workbench.
In May of this year, Dorian passed that trust to me. I'm the fourth woman to own Womanswork, and I don't take that lightly. This company has never been about any one owner. It's been about a relay — each of us picking it up, doing right by it for a while, and handing it off stronger than we found it.
Why this work found me
I came to Womanswork after 25 years designing gloves and handwear for some of the best brands in the outdoor and performance world. I trained at the London College of Fashion, then spent my career at Fownes and Tabar developing product for companies like Sweaty Betty, Rapha, MAAP, Orvis, The North Face, Black Diamond, and Canada Goose. I've built gloves for Cannondale cyclists and for the U.S. Army and Navy. I have spent a lot of years thinking about what a glove has to do for the person wearing it when the work actually gets hard.
So when the opportunity came to lead Womanswork, it didn't feel like a career change. It felt like coming home to the reason I got into this work in the first place — gear that respects the person using it, made by people who understand exactly what that person is up against, whether that's brambles, cold soil, or an 80-degree afternoon of weeding that isn't going to weed itself.
What doesn't change
Ownership has changed hands four times. What hasn't changed is who we're building for: strong women who show up and do the work, in the garden and everywhere else. That's the heart behind our tagline, and you'll start seeing it show up more in what we write and share — strong women build the future. It's not a new idea for us. It's the same one Karen put on the very first pair of gloves in 1985 — strong women building a gentle world. We're just saying it a little more plainly now: designed by women, for women who garden, work, and create.
I'm genuinely proud to be the one holding this company right now, and I'm excited about where we're taking it next — new products, new partnerships, and a lot more stories like this one. Thank you for gardening alongside us, some of you for decades. Here's to the next forty years.
Want the fuller story of where we're headed next? Keep an eye on your inbox — we've got more coming your way.
