Part 1: thick skinned

For as long as human beings have been around, there have been wallets. The oldest known wallet, for instance, was found on a 5,000 year-old Iceman discovered frozen on the border of Italy and Austria, with a coin purse attached to his belt. It’s a coming of age talisman, often handed down from father to son as a mark of maturity at the point of adulthood. Few other items are as definitively an ‘essential’ for everyday use, regardless of personal preference, age, or gender.

And when it comes to choosing the fabric, there’s only one right answer. A well made wallet of high grade leather ought to last beyond a lifetime, eventually acquiring the shape and smell of your earnings and most treasured personal effects. We knew we had to do it justice by finding the right craftsman to work with. At this point, we considered ourselves well-versed in leathers and assumed the place to go, as with most things we make in leather, was Italy. We asked around our network of craftsmen and suppliers, searching in earnest for someone with expertise in small leather goods and accessories. Finally, with a cocked eyebrow and a half-smile at our ignorance to the seemingly obvious answer, our shoemaker in Mirandola told us about the El Dorado of leather, the place that’s an open secret in the world of luxury: Ubrique, Spain.

The Pueblo Blanco

You wouldn’t think that the mecca of leather exists in a hidden corner of Andalusia, nestled in a stunning rocky valley, far removed from the global capitals of high fashion. It’s what’s known as a ‘pueblo blanco’ for its’ arresting collection of bright whitewashed houses, a mark of regional architecture drawing on Islamic cultural influences. Yet Ubrique is unlike any other Andalusian town, or any other town in the world for that matter. For the past 200 years, it’s been quietly building a reputation among those in the know as the international epicentre of luxury leather. Once famed for its’ unique leather tanning processes, Ubrique’s reputation for craftsmanship evolved over decades as local artisans learned to work the material with singular care and attention to detail. The traditional workshops in Ubrique carry no signage, their outward appearance giving away nothing to an unsuspecting passerby. And yet behind unassuming blue doors, artisans stitch labels that scream volumes on handbags, cases or wallets; Hermes, Carolina Herrera, Louis Vuitton, Chloe, Chanel.

The Big Factory

That being said, we mustn’t paint the town with a single (somewhat nostalgic) brush- unsurprisingly, not every operation is run the old way, in a quaint white house on a hill. When we first arrived, we had an appointment with a leather manufacturer on the outskirts of town that employs hundreds of workers in a sleek, modern facility reliant on advanced machinery and tech. There was no doubt that this was a factory designed to fulfil mass orders for big brands, willing to sacrifice the old way of doing things for a new kind of revenue.

It didn’t take long for the Big Factory to tire of our talk of artisans and questions about how automation might affect the finished product. On our way out from our second meeting, we got a tip from one of the leather workers about a small workshop his uncle ran in the town. Sergio’s workshop doesn’t have an online presence, so armed only with the instructions the worker from the factory had given us, we set out to investigate.

Sergio’s workshop

Once we’d sussed out which of the white buildings housed our prospective workshop and stepped inside, we couldn’t have felt any further from the Big Factory. There were no chrome coffee machines or 3D printers in sight- just 8 artisans, working with singular focus on transforming piles of leather into the most desirable high fashion accessories in the world. This felt closer to home for us, and brought to mind the universal attributes that are the mark of our workshops worldwide- the neat stacks of raw fabric, the sharp rapping of sewing machines, the practised way in which craftsmen work their materials.

Sergio told us that while Ubrique’s workshops and factories continued to act as primary suppliers of leather goods for many big brands, other stalwarts of luxury had turned their backs on the place after the financial crisis of 2008 hit the sector. Workshops struggled to keep up as production moved overseas to South East Asia, where large-scale factories sacrificed quality for quantity. Somewhat ironically, it was clients in those same emerging markets that favoured artisan-made products over mass produced items, meaning workshops in Ubrique had begun to look elsewhere to fill their order books. In a way, it was lucky for us that the craftsmen had grown receptive to a new way of doing things. Once Sergio had heard a bit more about what we do, he suggested we add an eyewear case to our range of leather accessories as a nod to our Takumi masters in Japan. It’s a connection to Japanese craftsmanship Ubrique had never seen before, and which we couldn’t wait to share with the world.