Reduce waste

I don’t often talk about this part, but it’s at the heart of what we do.

Today I’d like to explain our method of making bags, and how it allows us to significantly reduce leather waste. It’s actually quite simple.

This approach was first thought for leather, but it also impacts any other material we use.

Leather skins have a specific and limited size. When cutting the pieces of a bag from a skin, you have to carefully place each panel on top of it. The most beautiful part of the skin — usually the centre — is kept for the bigger and most visible parts of the bag. The sides are often used for less visible elements, like the bottom, side panels, or inside details.

Leather is a natural material. Its surface is not perfectly uniform. Even with finishing, you can see differences in texture and grain. On high-quality leather, especially, you can notice that the centre is smoother and finer, while the edges are often thicker and more textured.

If you take a regular everyday bag and divide it into its panels, then place those panels onto a leather skin, you’ll quickly see that there are many empty spaces around them. Those empty spaces become waste.

Very often, brands reduce this waste by cutting larger panels into smaller ones — for example, adding a central seam on a tote bag or a cut at the bottom. These are technical solutions that help reduce either waste or cost, because leather consumption is calculated based on the size of the skin, not on how much is actually used in the final product.

Our solution is different, and quite intuitive: the more you divide the bag into smaller pieces from the beginning, the more you can optimise the leather and reduce waste.

Another important point: because leather is natural, it often has marks or small defects. In high-quality leather, these cannot simply be “removed” unless you cover the surface with heavy embossing or coating — which usually reduces the natural beauty of the material. So when cutting traditional large panels, you must avoid these defects, which creates even more waste.

With our patchwork-inspired method, defects can be avoided much more easily without generating large amounts of waste. Smaller pieces allow us to navigate around imperfections instead of discarding large sections of the skin.

This becomes even more relevant when working with dead-stock leather, as we do. Sometimes these skins were set aside precisely because of visible defects. Dead stock is not suitable for every type of product — especially those requiring large, perfectly clean surfaces. But with our construction method, we can give value to material that might otherwise remain unused.

What I find interesting is that this technical solution — inspired by patchwork, which is part of our DNA — is not only about sustainability. It also defines the aesthetic of the brand. The visible construction, the panels, the colour combinations — they all come from this way of thinking.

It’s not random. It’s not decorative only. It’s structural.

I know this topic might not be the most “exciting” argument to sell a bag. But for me, it’s important to explain how and why we do things differently.

Thank you for reading, and let me know if you have any questions.

Best,
Bea