The Stronghold Mission

The Stronghold is a gallery and marketplace that offers a meticulously edited collection of the world's finest authentic heritage brands and the iconic products they create.

The oldest brand that we feature, Johnstons of Elgin, was founded in Scotland in 1797. The youngest brand that we feature, Marvis, was founded in Italy in 1958.

We believe that if a brand has remained in business for a minimum of fifty years without moving its manufacturing outside of its original country, while continuing to maintain the level of quality that was established at its founding, it deserves official recognition as a bona fide heritage brand.

For this reason, The Stronghold only presents brands that were founded more than fifty years ago, and only offers goods from those brands that are still manufactured in the original country of the brand's founding.

This means that brands must have been founded in or before 1968; and goods from American brands must be made in the USA, British brands in Great Britain, Portuguese brands in Portugal, Japanese brands in Japan, French brands in France, and so on across the globe.

Over time, some of the larger heritage brands have expanded to become multinational and/or globally sourced. In these cases, we will only offer items from their collections that are made in the original country of the brand's founding. This is not to imply that goods made by heritage brands in other countries are in any way inferior; it simply means that those products will not be offered by The Stronghold as part of our mission to support and encourage manufacture in founding countries.

We currently stock over forty authentic heritage brands at our flagship store on Abbot Kinney Blvd. in Venice, California, with many of them available on this website. We will continue to add numerous brands and products to our offering, with the ultimate goal of presenting the largest collection of authentic heritage brands and goods available anywhere in the world.