A bag is four decisions: the hide, the lining, the hardware, and how the whole thing is closed. Here is what we chose, what it costs us, and what we turned down.

1. The five materials we use

Everything comes from one tannery, Conceria Tempesti in Ponte a Egola, Tuscany, about forty kilometres from Florence. We have bought from them since 2019. Five articles, each doing one job:

2. The word on the label

The trade uses four words that sound interchangeable and are not:

• Full-grain — the outermost layer of the hide, untouched, grain intact. The strongest part. Used on the Ridley.
• Top-grain — the same layer, sanded flat to remove scars. Slightly weaker, more uniform, cheaper.
• Corrected grain — sanded, then stamped with a grain pattern and pigment-coated. Looks consistent; the surface is a film.
• Bonded leather — leather fibre and scrap glued and pressed into a sheet. Tear it and you see fibres, not grain. Despite the phrase “genuine leather” printed on so many labels, this is the lowest grade sold.

We use the words precisely. Where a bag is embossed we say embossed, and where it is full-grain we say full-grain, even when the cheaper word would sell better.

3. On the ostrich question

The Ashcroft is calfskin pressed under heat to raise a quill pattern. It is not farmed ostrich skin. The two materials are priced about four times apart, and a genuine ostrich tote at 14 inches would not retail at $489.

We say this on the product page, in the specification table, and here. A shop that calls an embossed bag “ostrich leather” is not describing a material, it is describing a price it would like to charge.

4. The lining

Undyed 10 oz cotton canvas from a mill in Okayama, Japan — the same cloth used for work aprons. It is heavier than the polyester taffeta in most bags and it does not shed fibres onto the inside of the leather. The Wren and the Ridley are unlined: one because the weave is the structure, the other because a lining would only add weight to a $209 bag.

5. The hardware

Solid brass throughout, nickel-free, lacquered. On the Fenwick and the Ridley the lock and turn-lock are gold-plated to 2.5 microns over brass. Below one micron the colour goes in a year and cannot be re-plated without stripping the piece.

Not brass-plated zinc, which is what most hardware is: plated zinc wears through at the corners of a buckle in two or three years and then rusts. Solid brass develops a patina and can be polished back.

6. Thread, edges and the weave

0.5–0.6 mm waxed polyester at a 3.5–4 mm stitch pitch. Every stress point is saddle-stitched by hand with two needles: if one thread breaks, the other holds, which is not true of a machine lock-stitch.

Edges are painted, not folded and glued — four thin coats on the structured bags, two on the soft ones where the leather has to keep moving. It takes about forty minutes a bag. It is also the first thing to fail on a cheap bag, usually at the corner where the paint went on in one thick pass.

The Wren is different: calfskin cut into 10 mm strips and woven by hand over a wooden block, about three and a half hours a bag. The strips are bevelled on both edges first, because an un-bevelled strip saws through the one it crosses.

What we do not use

• PU or PVC, in any proportion, on any part of a bag.
• Bonded leather, including in the base or the gusset where it would be hidden.
• Brass-plated zinc hardware.
• Cardboard or paper board stiffeners. Structure comes from leather weight, doubled panels and stitching.
• Farmed exotic skins. Everything patterned is embossed calf, and we label it that way.

Where it is cut and sewn

Every bag is cut, skived, stitched, edged and finished at our own workshop: Room 1108, Building B, 88 Jiangnan Avenue, Haizhu District, Guangzhou. Six makers, roughly forty bags a week. We do not subcontract, and we do not buy finished bags to rebrand.