It's almost a guarantee that no one has ever described a bland, white-washed office mall in the suburbs as being "So Portland." And yet, 16 miles from the Rose City's center in just such a complex, sits the most Portland of enterprises: Shwood Sunglasses.

Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisan don't meet you at the door, but they might as well.

The front office is small, with dark walls that give it a cozy feel. Lining one side is a found-wood display case housing previous generations of Shwood models.

Shwood, in case you haven't heard, is a purveyor of hand-crafted wooden eyewear that is cut, shaped, assembled, finished and shipped from its Beaverton-based office. It's a place where the guy operating the drum sander comes to work in the same clothes as the guy who does 3-D modeling, who both share the same shorts-and-T-shirt aesthetic with brand manager and co-founder Taylor Murray, who is also my tour guide on this sunny summer day.

He explains the company's DIY beginnings to me amidst the dull roar of machinery.

A worker uses a buffing wheel to individually sand and buff each piece of the sunglasses before each piece is assembled. Photo: Vivian Johnson/Wired

"The story on our site is actually that he went into a neighbor's backyard, cut a branch off a tree and literally whittled it by hand just with shitty hand tools - dull stuff, just like knives from the kitchen - and whittled a pair." The "he" in this story being head designer and original idea man Eric Singer, and the "it" being the primordial soup from which Shwood has evolved.

Murray met Singer, along with his three fellow co-founders, on a cross-country snowboarding tour where they all lived on the same bus (which is still parked behind the workshop, FYI). Singer showed them a pair of his homespun shades, which, at the time, were carved from a single block of wood, and hadn't circulated any farther than friends and acquaintances.

But Murray and company knew immediately that he had created something special. "We were like, 'Dude let's figure out a way to make more of these and make them faster. These are amazing,'" says Murray. "So it went through like a year and a half of us just like testing and talking to people and finding out what a laser cutter was."

The five busmates-turned-business-associates went to friends, family, former professors and "any engineering people we knew" to figure out how to A) start a company and B) mass-produce a sturdy, attractive, repeatable product that people wanted to buy. "We had no idea – seriously none – and there wasn't really like anything to base it off of," says Murray. "There was nobody to copy or like reverse engineer, and we didn't even want to do that anyway."

Three years and 45 employees later, Shwood has found its footing. The company has gone from making 10 pairs of glasses a day to more than 150, which Murray says doesn't even keep up with demand. There are 10 different models for sale now – almost all named for towns across Oregon, their wooden frames befitting the temperate rainforest that spans the Pacific Northwest – in addition to "probably 25 styles that nobody's ever even seen that are just kind of in our archives."

Shwood also just released their 2012 look book accompanied by a short film shot in stereographic "3-D" that highlights their Select premium line. It's the perfect marriage of two typically separate recreational pursuits: skateboards and lasers.

A drum sander is used to sand the wood down to the correct thickness, and a worker uses a caliper to measure consistency throughout the piece of wood during the first step of making the sunglasses. NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

To see firsthand how these two things come together, Murray leads us into the Shwood Shop, where materials like imported Indian Rosewood and African Zebrawood are transformed into fashion accessories. It all starts in a small room with a couple guys, a band saw and a drum sander. In here, planks of wood are cut and ground to uniform size and thickness before moving on to the all-important laser cutter for frames to be cut out. It's this machine that allows Shwood to achieve that crucial combo of repeatability and speed that lets a business satisfy both quality and demand.

From there it's on to assembly, where those laser-precise exotic wood cutouts are hand-glued together, layer by layer, to produce strong, complete frames, "Essentially what they're doing in here is they're binding it up like a skateboard," says Murray. After that, the frames are placed in molds to give them their convex shape – again, just like a skateboard.

After going through roughly 10 prototyping concepts, this was the method the Shwood founders determined to be the best way to deliver durable, quality sunglasses made from a traditionally VERY breakable material.

From that point on, the sanding, finishing and product testing stages are all very hush hush. There's a whole squadron of people hunched over machines working to clean and polish each pair, but to discuss what exactly happens would reveal trade secrets.

Murray won't say what they are or where they're used in the assembly line, but Shwood has developed custom, locally fabricated equipment to streamline its operation and maximize quality. And in case you thought they were phoning it in, even the Carl Zeiss lenses are ground to size in-house.

A laser cutter is used to individually cut each sunglass frame. Photo: Vivian Johnson/Wired

After assembly comes quality control, "torsional tests, up and down flex tests, drop tests." Murray's not at liberty to disclose what exactly goes on in that room either, but we are given reassurance that it's all very scientific, "We're breaking stuff non stop back there. So it's pretty cool." Here's to the pursuit of excellence!

Before showing me out, Murray takes me above the shop floor to a sort of cabin-in-the-woods conference room, a space where Shwood creatives can toss around ides or just come sit. There is wooden everything everywhere, but especially cool are the house craft projects that employees have made from production waste, like the wall mounted custom hatchet built from leftovers during the laser-cutting stage. A "Shwood" logo is placed in the middle. It's really very beautiful, and a fine way to reclaim "trash" in the city nicknamed Stumptown.

Business is good for Shwood. The company is set to move to an office that is nearly four times the size of its current operation, and plans to double its employee roster in the new space. Now that they know what they're doing, Murray says the challenges of scaling and improving efficiency keep them more than busy enough, but in a good way.

And even if they don't get it right the first time, Team Shwood will keep failing up until they do. "It's exciting trying to fix those things. We're always seeing what's out there. Everything is working well, but that doesn't mean it's the best," says Murray. "We try crazy stuff all the time just because we like to push what's out there and kind of experiment. A huge part of experimenting is failing, but that's how you learn what does work."