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Every bag we make is made by hand, one at a time. Which means that making one to your specification isn’t a departure from how we work. It’s simply the same process, with your decisions in it rather than ours.
If you’ve been looking at the collection and thinking almost, but in a different colour or I’d want it slightly larger, this is how that conversation starts.
There’s a spectrum, and it’s worth being clear where we sit on it.
At one end there’s personalisation, which usually means stamping initials onto a bag that’s otherwise identical to every other one. At the other there’s a full commission, designed from nothing.
Most of our made-to-order work sits between the two, and that’s usually the right place for it. An existing design, adjusted. The proportions of a bag that already works, in a leather you’ve chosen, with the details changed to suit you. You get something genuinely yours without the cost and the risk of designing a bag from a blank sheet.
The leather. This is the change that alters a bag most. The same design in tan and in a deep dark hide are two quite different objects. We work in full grain vegetable tanned leather, plant-dyed, so the range is natural rather than synthetic, and it will keep developing after you take it home.
The hardware finish. Our brass is custom-cast for our bags. How it’s finished changes the character considerably.
Proportions. Within reason, a design can be adjusted. If a bag is close to right but you need a little more depth, that’s usually possible.
Straps. Length, width, and whether they’re detachable. If you know you’ll wear a bag across the body most days, the strap should be built for that rather than tolerated.
Lining and details. The suede lining, the stitching, the tassel, the stamp.
What can’t be changed is the standard of the work. We won’t shortcut a construction method to hit a price or a deadline, and if something you’d like isn’t going to wear well, we’ll say so before we make it rather than after.
You get in touch. Tell us what you’re imagining. It doesn’t need to be precise. Most conversations begin with an existing bag and the phrase “but I’d want it to…”.
We talk it through. What you’d like, what’s possible, what it will cost and how long it will take. If we think a standard piece from the collection would serve you better, we’ll say that too. It happens more often than you’d expect and we’d rather be honest than take an order.
We confirm the detail. Leather, hardware, dimensions, finishing. Everything agreed before anything is cut.
It gets made. By hand, in the studio in Staffordshire, by the same person and the same methods as every other bag we produce. Nothing is outsourced.
It comes to you. With its dust bag, and with our care guide so it starts life properly.
Longer than buying from the shelf, and that’s rather the point. Vegetable tanned leather can’t be hurried, hand-stitching can’t be hurried, and a piece made to order joins a queue of other work.
Lead times vary with the season and with what you’ve asked for. We’ll give you a realistic date at the outset and we’d rather quote honestly than optimistically.
One practical note. If a bespoke bag is intended as a gift for a particular date, start the conversation early. Christmas and Mother’s Day both fill the studio, and the bags that go wrong are almost always the ones commissioned three weeks before they were needed.
Not always, and we’ll tell you when it isn’t.
If you love a bag in the collection as it stands, buy that one. It’ll arrive sooner and cost less, and there’s nothing lesser about it.
Bespoke earns its place when there’s a real reason. A colour that matters to you. A size that solves a problem no standard bag solves. A piece for an occasion, or one intended to be handed on. When there’s a reason like that, a made-to-order bag becomes something quite different from a purchase.
There’s no obligation in asking, and no charge for a conversation. Tell us what you have in mind and we’ll tell you honestly whether we can make it, what it would involve, and when you’d have it.
Get in touch, or have a look at the collection first if you’d like a starting point.
