Choosing leather.

Leather is the single largest line on most of our bills of materials, and the vocabulary around it is old, loose and occasionally used to hide things. This post is the short version of the conversation we have with every new buyer before a hide is cut.

Full grain, corrected, split

Full grain keeps the hide's original surface, scars and all; it wears the best and costs the most. Corrected grain has been sanded and embossed to look uniform, trading character for consistency. A split is the lower layer of the hide, usually finished with a coating; it is honest material for the right product and a false economy for the wrong one.

None of these words is a quality grade by itself. A good corrected grain outperforms a poor full grain, which is why the sample, not the noun, is what should be approved.

The spec sheet is where a beautiful hide becomes a repeatable one.

Reading a hide on the cutting table

A hide is not uniform. The butt cuts firm and consistent; the belly stretches; the neck carries growth marks. A good cutter maps each panel of the shoe to the part of the hide that suits it, which is why cutting is a skilled job and why yield, not price per square foot, is the number that decides what a hide really costs.

Questions worth writing into the spec

Ask for thickness as a range in millimetres, not a word like sturdy. Name the finish and the tannage. State where splits are acceptable and where they are not. Agree what happens to panels cut from scarred areas: hidden placements, rejected, or accepted with a price. Every one of those sentences costs a minute at spec time and saves a container-load of argument later.

Send us the product and the price point, and we will send back cuttings you can bend, scratch and argue with. That conversation is free, and it is the most useful hour in the whole programme.