Meet the artisans behind our leather bags
Our bags come from a handful of small workshops around Kathmandu, not a factory. Here is who makes them, and why we buy this way.
We get asked where the bags come from often enough that it's worth answering properly. The short version: eleven workshops around the Kathmandu valley, none with more than nine people in it.
Why small workshops
The obvious way to make bags is one factory, one production line, one contract. It's cheaper and much easier to manage. We buy the harder way because of what the line does to the work: on a production line one person sews the same seam for eight hours, and nobody in the building can make a whole bag.
In the workshops we buy from, one person cuts, stitches, edges and finishes a bag start to finish, and puts their initials inside the lining seam. Look for them — they're there.
The people
Ram, in Patan, has been cutting buffalo leather for twenty-six years. He can read a hide by eye: where it stretched on the animal, where it will stretch in a strap, which parts to cut around. This is the part of the job that can't be taught quickly, and it's why his bags keep their shape.
Sunita runs a five-person workshop in Bhaktapur that does all our cotton and leather combination work. She took it over from her father in 2016 and has since trained four women who had never sewn commercially.
The Lalitpur cooperative — nine members, all of whom own a share — handles our larger orders. They set their own rates. We are told them; we do not negotiate them.
What we pay
Rates are agreed per bag before the run, in writing, and paid within seven days of delivery rather than on the ninety-day terms that are normal in this trade. Half of that is fairness and half is arithmetic: a workshop waiting three months to be paid has to borrow to buy leather, and the interest comes out of the maker's margin.
What this costs you
More. A hand-finished bag from a nine-person workshop cannot compete on price with a line-made one, and we're not going to pretend otherwise. What you get for it is a bag that was made by a person who could have made the whole thing themselves, because they did.
