The atelier opens at seven. The shutter goes up. The kettle goes on. The first thing you hear, before anyone speaks, is the hum of the extractor over the finishing bench.
What follows is a note on how the atelier actually works — a single day at the Bethnal Green workshop, written for the patron who wants to know whose hands touched the piece.
7.00 — Cutting
The morning belongs to the cutting bench. The hides are laid out flat — sometimes six, sometimes a dozen, depending on the runs opening this week. Each hide is inspected under a north-facing skylight for scars, healed insect bites, and areas where the grain is uneven. These are marked with tailor's chalk and cut around. Nothing from those areas becomes a bag.
The templates for each piece are heavy card, cut from an original master that lives locked in a drawer. The maker lays the template over the hide, aligns it with the grain direction, and cuts with a curved leather knife against a marble bench. Each panel is cut individually. A tote body might be five panels. A backpack thirty. A jigsaw duffle over fifty.
Cutting is the loudest quiet work in the studio. There is no music. Just the small snap of the knife against the marble.
9.30 — Skiving and edging
Once cut, each panel has its edges skived — thinned along the seam line so the panels can be joined without a lumpy overlap. Skiving is done on a small hand-held machine that shaves 0.3mm of leather off the underside of every seam edge. It is fussy, slow work. It is what separates a well-made bag from a bag that reads inflated.
Then the panel edges are dyed. The atelier hand-mixes edge dye to match each colourway — Nkari, Black Lychee, Orange Togo, whatever the run calls for. The dye is applied with a fine sable brush in two coats, dried, then burnished with a wooden slicker. This edge finish is what protects the leather cross-section for the twenty-year life of the piece.
11.00 — Assembly
Panels move from the cutting bench to the assembly bench, where they are stitched together. Every piece is single-hand stitched, meaning one maker holds it from the first assembly seam to the last polish. This is why the stitching stays even across the whole bag — a team-assembled piece has small tell-tale shifts in rhythm at every handoff.
The atelier uses a Cobra Class 4 sewing machine — an industrial workhorse tuned for leather. Every seam is backstitched at start and end, then buried into the interior so no thread ends are visible outside. This takes twice as long as machine-lock stitching. It also lasts.
13.00 — Lunch
The studio breaks for an hour. There is a small kitchen. Someone always brings jollof from the takeaway on Cambridge Heath Road. The maker on the Cobra Class 4 washes their hands before returning to the leather.
14.00 — Hardware
After lunch, hardware fitting. Buckles, D-rings, magnetic closures, swivel clips. All muted brushed gold, cast in a small foundry in Birmingham the atelier has used since the second season. Each piece of hardware is set by hand — the leather is punched, the hardware is fed through, then peened flat on the underside so the fitting cannot loosen.
Hardware is where the atelier's discipline shows. Cheaper houses use press-fit hardware that pops out after two years of use. Peened hardware stays for the life of the bag.
16.00 — Interior and lining
The interior canvas is cut, marked for pocket placement, and glued to the interior side of the exterior panels. Interior pockets are stitched in before the piece is closed. This is fiddly work — the pocket has to be reinforced without adding visible bulk to the exterior line.
17.30 — Final polish, boxing
The finished piece is inspected under the same north-facing light as the cutting bench. Any small imperfection — a stray thread, an edge dye run, a hardware fitting slightly out of alignment — is corrected on the spot. Then the piece is polished, stuffed with tissue, and boxed with a hand-signed atelier card.
18.00 — Shutter down
The kettle goes off. The extractor slows. The pieces made today rest on the shelf overnight so the glue can set. Tomorrow they ship.
This is what happens between the moment ten patrons commit and the moment a piece arrives at your door. It takes seven days. Now you know what those seven days look like.
— The atelier