I didn't set out to start a leather goods brand. Honestly, I'm not sure I would have believed you if you'd told me that's where I was headed.

Before all of this, I was an environmental consultant. I spent years tracking soil contamination, managing cleanup projects, studying the ways the choices we make about materials ripple outward into the world. I was good at it. But when my kids were small and our days were shaped around naptimes, I wandered into my father-in-law's barn and found a pile of old leather hand tools and a vintage sewing machine gathering dust.

I had never sewn a thing in my life.

I taught myself. Slowly, imperfectly, during the quiet windows between feedings and naps and the particular chaos of early motherhood. I made mistakes. A lot of them. But something about working with my hands felt like it was filling a part of me that spreadsheets and site reports never quite reached.

The bags started finding their way to people. A few on Etsy, then more. Customers responded in ways I didn't expect. And I kept going.

But there was a problem I couldn't get around. The leather.

My background made it impossible for me to look away from how most commercial leather is produced. Conventional tanning processes are hard on the environment and even harder to trace. I knew enough to know I didn't want any part of that, and finding something better felt nearly impossible. I came close to walking away from the whole thing.

Then I went to a leather trade show in New York City. And everything changed.

I found them there: family-owned tanneries from Tuscany, producing vegetable-tanned leather the way it's been made for centuries. No synthetic chemicals. Slow, traditional process. The kind of material that's as easy on the planet as it is beautiful to hold. The moment I touched it, I knew. This was it. This was the reason to keep going.

I brought it home to Vermont and never looked back.

Now I work out of my own studio, making every bag by hand, start to finish. I cut the leather, stitch it, burnish the edges, pull it into shape. Each one takes time. That's intentional. I'm not trying to scale into something I can't stand behind. I'm trying to make things that last.

The designs are simple on purpose. Timeless shapes, minimal details, nothing that will look dated in two years. I want you to reach for this bag every single day and never wonder if it still fits your life. And the leather itself does something remarkable over time. It develops a patina that's entirely your own, shaped by where you take it and how you carry it. What you bring home will look different in a year, and even better in five. That's not a flaw. That's the whole point.

I grew this from a few bags on Etsy to a studio I'm genuinely proud of, and the thing that still gets me is the people it's reached. Customers who write back years later to tell me the bag has been everywhere with them. That it's held up through moves and new jobs and kids of their own. That it's still their favorite thing.

That's what I'm making this for.

I'm glad you're here.

Juliette