A deeper look at what inspires and motivates us and our creative process!
Are you unknowingly supporting an enormous supply chain with a huge carbon footprint? Probably. A lot of goods and accessories a made like this. Raw materials sourced from country one, refined in country two, assembled in another country, possibly boxed and ship from a fourth country then sent to you. The life of one product that basically did a full rotation around the globe. That’s a lot of travel and a lot of energy. We’re here to show you another way. All of our goods are sourced from the USA. Our leather is from Pennsylvania, waxed canvas from New Jersey and Brass hardware is from Massachusetts. They are sent to us where we design, cut, make and ship all from our Philadelphia Studio. Then they make their way to you. We’re not perfect but we are trying to find a more efficient and environmentally friendly way. As they say perfection gets in the way of progress. We can all make a difference with these small changes. We’re making goods you can be proud of and we didn’t even mention the quality of the raw materials we use.
Our Leather : Wickett & Craig from Pennsylvania
We believe this is the best leather out there. Made using an age old process that has been time tested for over a hundred years. We use their English Bridle vegetable tanned leather and couldn’t be more happy with its performance. We love the way it ages, resists scratched, and breaks in over time.
Our process in a nutshell
We’re creative people. We love learning new things and leather craft has certainly kept us on our toes. We learn something new with each design and our heart still flutters each time we make a product and ship it out!
Brainstorming:
When we are feeling inspired. We sketch and sketch and sketch. Then sketch probably a little more
We take inspiration from nature, friends, from classics and trends.
Once we’ve refined an idea it’s time to put it into action.
Patterning:
We make a pattern out of card stock which helps us visualize our designs in 3D
Now it’s time to make it our of leather
We’ve tried to make a preliminary design in another material but found that nothing really acts like leather during the construction phase. It is more costly but we find it worth it.
This is where to kinks really get worked out.
We ask ourselves: Is the scale right? Does the handle length make sense? are the details in the right place Did we over complicate part of the design? Does this make sense with our brand and collection?
It often take a few iterations at this stage and once we’ve boiled it down to its simplest form, that is when we know we’re ready to launch!
Feedback:
We ask a ton of people along the way for their opinion. We post on social media, ask friends and value all sorts of perspectives. We’re never afraid to make changes when we need to.
Once we launch and the product does well. We get a die made of all the component to ensure each bag is made to the same specifications. This helps speed the process and creates consistency for each bag that leaves our Studio.
Hopefully you learned a little about our creative process and why we enjoy making leather goods.
