Hey, I'm Juliette! I make handmade vegetable tanned leather handbags that get better with time.

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

Before all of this, I was a geologist with an environmental consulting firm. I spent years monitoring soil contamination, managing cleanup projects, and inadvertently studying the ways the choices we make about materials ripple outward into the world. 

When my kids were babies and our days were arranged 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 chaos of early motherhood. I made mistakes. A lot of them. But something about working with my hands felt so satisfying.

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 chrome-based tanning processes are hard on the environment. I knew I didn't want any part of that, but 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.

There I met family-owned tanneries from Tuscany, producing vegetable-tanned leather the way it's been made for centuries. No synthetic chemicals. Slow, traditional process - an artform in itself.  The moment I touched it, I knew. 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 strap edges, and pack it up to ship out to you.

The designs are simple on purpose. Timeless shapes, minimal details, nothing that will look dated in two years. And this leather in particular 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. Your bag will look different in a year, and even better in five.

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 trips, 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.