Owner, Jessica Cahoon, grew up in a creative house drawing on stair steps and walls, crafting with her mom, and playing store with her two sisters. She has always had a passion for hunting down the unexpected and in 2004 opened up her first shop, fort & field, in order to offer a curated collection of her finds. The shop was intended to be home and garden items ("fort" for home and "field" for garden), inspired by the 40 acres of field and woods she explored in her small Minnesota hometown. However, after visiting a most interesting gift shop and laying eyes on a spool of red & white striped bakers twine for the first time, Jessica spent hours searching for the source. The search was to no avail, so Jessica wound red & white striped yarn into balls selling it as her version of bakers twine. The yarn sold like hotcakes and she knew she was on to something. After weeks of searching, she finally found the source and was able to offer true traditional bakers twine to customers outside of butchers and bakeries, one of the first in the US to do so. Her interest in packaging soon expanded and finding a lack of paper treat bag options in the US, she began importing colorful striped paper bags from England where they had been used by gift shops for years to hold small cards and candies. fort & field sold the bags from England for $80 per 100 and could not keep them in stock, hard to believe with the plethora of amazing options now available from small to big retailers alike. The third product Jessica hunted down, paper straws, further completed the ultimate path of fort & field towards party and packaging supplies vs. home and garden. In one Saturday blitz trying desperately to locate the perfect paper doily, Jessica ran across a restaurant supply company selling red & white striped paper straws. Nostalgic and seemingly the perfect addition to the party trend, which was just beginning to catch on, Jessica bought a few boxes of the straws (and solid white too) to test them out. We now know how reception to the paper straws turned out with a rainbow of colors currently available, hearts, stars, and polka dots as well! fort & field's line of party and packaging supplies grew to include ice cream cups and spoons, cupcake liners, those paper doilies that started the fateful Saturday search, wooden cutlery, and so much more.

Products have been featured in Real Simple, Family Circle, Southern Weddings Magazine, Wedding Style Guide (Australia), and Eco Beautiful Weddings Magazine.

"As a young child, along with her two sisters, she created elaborate stores in the unfinished basement of our home. They played for hours creating merchandise, displays, and signs for their individual storefronts. Now, as an adult, the marketing strategies and accompanying retail-specific language is more advanced, but... the environment remains the same. She still plays. In her store."
- Adrienne Cahoon, Mother