As of today, we are dropping the prices on all of our men’s and women’s bags.

We are dropping the prices, but we’re maintaining the same level of quality and worksmanship that you expect from Restrepo Leather. And our products will always remain strictly hand-made. 

First of all, I love the handles. They’re made with natural leather, which means that no color is added to the leather in the tanning process. Though natural leather looks a little weird at first (kind of fleshy, reminding you that it came from an actual animal), over time and with some sun and sweat, it develops a gorgeous patina. I love that the handles change, and I love their contrast with the darker chestnut leather of the bag.

Second of all, I love that I can take this bag absolutely anywhere. I use it to carry a bottle of wine over to a friend’s place for dinner. I use it when traveling to stash a book, my passport, and a bottle of water. But it’s not pretentious either – I use it all the time when I go to the corner store to pick up some groceries. No canvas grocery bags for me.

Third of all, I love that Jerry made it. It was one of the first bags he made, before he really knew what he was doing. He didn’t use great leather or high-quality thread, because he didn’t know then how to pick them out. The stitching isn’t perfect. But he put in hours of love and sweat into it. I love when people ask where I got my bag and can say that Jerry made it for me.

Last of all, I love that Jerry didn’t intentionally make the bag for me. He thought that the tote could serve as a men’s bag and made it for himself, though I quickly convinced him otherwise. 

“I want people to know that our work is 100% handmade, I want people to value the work. All of the work that goes into that bag. I want people to wonder – was the person who made this bag happy that day? Was he sad? Was the sun shining? Was he hanging out with his girlfriend? I’m not talking about value in terms of price, I’m talking about what’s behind each piece of work.”

Juan Carlos Hernandez has been a leatherworker for 13 years. He enrolled at the Escuela de Artes y Oficios Santo Domingo, a technical school for artisans in Bogota, and stumbled into leatherworking. “They had classes for woodworking, silversmithing, and leatherworking,” Juancho explains. “The other two courses were full. But I enjoyed leatherworking from day one.” One of his professors invited him to the workshop. That professor was Cesar, and they have been working together ever since.

His favorite part of the leatherworking process is punching the holes to prepare the pieces to be sewn together. But Juancho also designs his own bags, specializing in braids. “I took a class at school on leather braiding, but I mostly learned by reading a book and practicing on my own. I like that a braid is complicated. It makes my pieces stand out, it makes them unique.”

Juancho dreams of being able to travel around the world and run his own leather workshop. Aside from leatherworking, Juan loves riding his bike, watching new movies, and listening to music. He says that bike riding is cool, in this order:

3. Riding a bike.
2. Riding a bike while listening to music.
1. Riding a bike while listening to music and while with a girl you like.

Juancho’s favorite bags are the Cordoba Weekender (in chestnut brown with blue suede) and the Bogota Tote (in dark brown).

“I like leatherworking because it’s relaxing, it makes me happy. It’s interesting work… you could say it’s exclusive. There aren’t many people doing this. I mean, there are a lot of bags out there – but work like what we do, it’s hard to find.”

“People see the difference between something made by hand and something made by machine,” Luis says. “That’s the most gratifying part, both for me and the client. When the customer receives their product and they say, ‘I love this, it turned out really well,’ I love hearing that. It’s incentive to work every day to be better.”

Luis showing off his wallet that he made 20 years ago and has been using ever since.

Luis Eduardo Castellanos has lived in Bogota his whole life. He has been doing leatherworking for 45 years – the longest of anyone at the workshop, including Cesar. As a kid, Luis started an apprenticeship to learn saddlery, the art of leatherworking for horses, including saddles and reins. From there, he moved on to making bags and braided leather belts, everything always made by hand. He worked in the military for a bit, making everything from gun holsters to tents. Luis tells his story [translated from Spanish]:

I opened up my own workshop at home for a few years and would sell my saddlework to shops in Bogota. After people stopped buying hand-made, I left leatherworking for a while. I worked a variety of jobs – as a driver for the city, as an administrator for a produce market. But I always kept up with leatherworking at home as a hobby. After my other jobs, I tried to sell my leather pieces again, but by that time, things had changed. Leather isn’t used as much anymore in saddlery, now people use nylon. Nothing is hand-made anymore, everything is machine-stitched and with rivets. It’s no longer artisanal. People no longer valued my work.

I was working as a city driver when I stumbled across this leather workshop. I was driving by and stopped at the stoplight in front. The pieces in the window caught my attention. I came back another day and stopped in to say hi… Cesar was working with some students, and I saw that they were stitching by hand. I was surprised, because you don’t see people doing that much these days. I told Cesar that I’d been doing leatherworking for years and asked if I could work for him. We chatted while I told him about all of my experience. He said he wasn’t looking for any help at the moment, but called me two weeks later. I’ve been working here ever since, for about a year and a half.

When I ask what his favorite leather is, he tells me the whiskey. “It’s so beautiful and fun to work with.” His favorite bags are the Restrepo Briefcase and Magdalena Handbag – both in whiskey leather with orange suede. He says, “I’ve worked with machine-stitching too, it’s a lot faster than working by hand. For example, with the Restrepo Briefcase – that’s something that, if I were making several at a time, would take me about 3 hours to do each one. By hand it takes 35 hours.”

Luis continues about how he loves the work here. He especially loves the clean look of the double-needle stitching on our men’s bags. “I love working with my hands, it’s relaxing,” he says. “I enjoy learning new things.”

Poppa was a creative man with big ideas and a love of life. He took over his father-in-law’s dry goods business, selling everything from thread to buttons to denim. Back in the day, jeans weren’t fashionable – they were a working man’s fabric, worn by cowboys and lumberjacks. Poppa was one of the first people to market jeans as something to be worn by everyone. He made my mom and aunt model his stylish overalls, Polly-Alls.

Though in the end another Jewish man by the name of Levi Strauss did a better job of branding denim to a wider audience, my aunt recently saw a photo of Andrew Young wearing Polly-Alls in a Civil Rights march. Now that’s some Southern heritage to be proud of.

I like to think that Poppa would love sitting in the leather workshop, chatting with Cesar about leather and learning all about the production process. And I wonder what pieces of history our leather will witness.

Robin, in her Clark Kent day job, is a mapmaker. She uses advanced software programs to make detailed, beautiful, interesting maps, for all kinds of clients and with all kinds of applications. One of Robin’s biggest pet peeves, even more than people spelling Colombia with a “u,” is the overuse of the Mercator projection (you know, that awful map where Greenland looks as big as the United States). The inherent problem with any map projection is trying to transfer a three-dimensional object to two dimensions.

Working with leather is a lot like working with maps. Like a map, a leather hide is a two-dimensional representation of a three-dimensional object. Leather is a natural material. It’s the skin of a dead animal, complete with stretch marks, small nicks and cuts, and even the brand on the animal’s backside. Some parts of the hide are like Greenland on the Mercator map – stretchy and un-usable. Any good leatherworker has to learn how to work around these limitations and make efficient use of the hide. For example, making sure to cut strap pieces out of the cow’s back, often the straightest part of the hide.  That problem-solving is one of my favorite things about leatherworking.

Unfortunately, leatherworking appears to be one of the few things left in the world that has yet to be exhaustively explored and documented on the internet (the top 2 Google search results for leatherworking are World of Warcraft-related, and much of the rest is for LARPers).  I’ve done my fair share of research, and there isn’t much out there on how to make high quality leather bags by hand.

I was overjoyed to find out that I’m not the only person who had this thought. Sean at Fine Leatherworking noticed the same thing and decided to create a space for an online fine leatherworking community, a place where high quality tools, materials, and knowledge can be found in one place.  

Sean was interested to learn about my route to the craft and the broader state of leatherworking in Colombia, and posted the transcript of our conversation to his blog.

We are hopeful that some exciting new developments will come from this partnership. First up: experimenting with new thread.

It’s funny to think how many things have changed since we first started this process. We originally thought that we’d only sell men’s bags. We thought that we wouldn’t build a full online store, but rather would sell through Etsy. We had no clue what we were doing.

That weekend, we debated the principles to put in our mission statement. How much could we strip down until we were left with just the essentials?

• Supporting a strictly hand-made method of leather bag production.
• Creating beautiful, long-lasting leather goods.
• Abiding by ethical production standards and treating all team members like human beings.
• Providing individual care and attention to every customer.

Looking back, we pretty accurately laid out the fundamental aspects of the company. In giving (unsolicited) advice, many people have questioned these principles. “Why don’t you use sewing machines?” they ask. “Why don’t you work with different people so that you can pay them less?” We didn’t start Restrepo Leather to squeeze profits out of local manufacturers. We entered into this because we believed in the quality of strictly hand-made and the people we were working with. And that still holds true, one year later.

At the moment, we’re looking for someone who can take excellent portraits and product photos (wallets!). If you’re the person for the job or if you know someone who is, let us know.

For those of us who have hair that looks like a forest stricken by disease, hats aren’t just an aesthetic choice – they also keep one’s scalp from burning and peeling. That said, it isn’t easy.  Having never been a “hat person” before, where do you begin? How do you avoid looking like that creepy guy in a fedora? Where’s the middle ground between a top hat and a trucker hat?

The first hat I ever owned was a faluche, a velour beret covered in pins and ribbons, worn by some French students, which I received when I studied abroad in Lyon. However, the faluche, despite its obvious charm, isn’t the most versatile hat.

Next came the “Che hat.” Really just a military-inspired cap, this hat is a workhorse, an excellent companion for months-long backpacking trips.

Once in Colombia, though, I had to go local. In the old part of town, La Candelaria, there’s a small side street filled with nothing but hat shops. It was time to buy a Panama hat, made in Colombia.

Next, I plan on visiting a 65-year-old hat company in Bogotá called Barbisio and see what else Colombia has to offer.

This will be something of a recurring series under the heading “Dressing Up,” where I expand upon a particular point or nuance in “my sartorial evolution.”