- It's an ode to the way that things used to be made.
It's not just something that's been mass produced
or put through a line and made millions of.
We make them hand-by-hand, individually, each one.
There's definitely faster ways.
There's ways to cut corners.
But how do we make something without cutting any corners?
What's the best way we can do it?
It's a long way to do it.
It's a hard way to do it.
But if there's a way to do it that way,
then we figure it out.
You can really see that in the quality
of the bags when you get one.
When you hold one.
My name is Lindy McDonough,
and I am the Creative Director at Lotuff Leather.
For us, we grew up in New England,
and I would get a bag one season.
It would have a big logo on it.
And then two seasons later,
you'd almost be embarrassed to have it.
And that's not in New England
how we grow up, how we have goods.
You should have a thing that you
can pass down to your next generation
that's gonna get more beautiful as you use it.
And that was always the ethos for the company.
The Triumph briefcase,
from the outside, it looks very clean.
But it's actually a very complicated bag.
It's one of the most difficult bags that we make.
Takes about four to six weeks to make each one.
There's no rushing that.
And the bag has about 61 individual pieces in each bag.
We start on the cutting table.
We roll out a hide.
Our hides all come from a family-owned tannery.
Our leather is all made specially for us.
All of the leather is fully vegetable tanned,
so no chromium, no formaldehyde, nothing in the base.
If you've ever had a piece of leather goods
that over time starts to peel
and there's white that's showing through,
that means that there's actually some sort of chemical
or chromium inside the leather that's causing it to rust.
Our leather won't do that.
It'll get more beautiful and patina as you use it.
You're also looking for imperfections in the hide.
So tick bites, scars, open cuts, anything like that,
just making sure at the beginning process that you find it.
Make sure we don't use it.
The bags then go through,
and all 61 of those pieces are cut from one hide.
You're actually getting someone who laid out that cut
and then thought about what was
the piece that's going next to it
and then thought about the piece
that was going next to that.
They all get cut and individually numbered.
And then we'll bring them over to the splitter.
Splitting is taking the leather and making it thinner.
We have different weights for every part of the bag.
From the design process too,
it's one of those things that we spend
a lot of time thinking about,
like could this be a little bit thinner?
Could this be thicker?
We measure every single piece,
and we measure it to actually the 10th of an ounce.
We really do pay a lot of attention
to the weight of every piece.
Once everything is split, it goes to the grinding station.
The grinding station is where all of the pieces are shaped.
We take all of the pieces,
and we sand them straight.
All of those pieces are shaped and ground
and done by eye.
It's one of those things of
why what we do can't be automated.
From the grinding station it moves to the painting station.
We have about four people painting
to every one person at every other station.
Because we do fully traditional,
burnished and polished edges,
the painters get the ground pieces.
They paint a layer,
and they essentially raise the grain of the leather
and then they bring it over to the buffing machine
and then buff it.
And then they bring it back to the painting station
and then they paint another coat of edge dye
and then they would buff it again.
And you're going back and forth
with all 61 of those pieces at the minimum of three times,
and some of which, eight.
That's why we hire artists.
They have an eye for it,
and they're like, this is not right yet.
And they will finish it until it's right.
So when we started this space, this manufacturing space,
five years ago, we had three people,
and now we are at 22.
It's pretty rad.
Our team at Lotuff is 75% women.
75% of them are under the age of 35,
and about 70% of them have a Bachelor's degree.
Always the biggest struggle has been
how do you find work that you know you have a day job
from nine to five that can support your life as an artist?
And that was always the vision behind what we do for Lotuff.
We have furniture makers, jewelry designers,
print makers, illustrators, painters.
And so making a great job they could come in,
work with us 30 hours a week, get full benefits.
Health care, all of those benefits,
and then getting to do their studio practice
outside of it is a really amazing thing
and we get amazing work because of that.
And I think it's what makes
what goes into the bag so special.
In-between the painting phase and the stitching phase,
there's one piece in every bag that gets the bag number
and the Lotuff logo.
And so those pieces come to the monogramming station.
We log all of the numbers in our records.
We know what pieces were going through.
What color it was, what style it was,
and what number is correlated to that.
Then things go to stitching.
So all 61 of those pieces for
the Triumph will get brought over
and get the first level of stitching.
We use a super strong thread that's made by a local maker.
We get all the thread dyed to match
each one of the leather colors.
For the most part, every single one of
the pieces has a specific amount of stitches
that's their stitch width from the edge is really specific.
The amount of stitches per inch is really specific.
All of that is considered,
and then they moved to the turn and burn station,
which is our hand-stitching station.
So they finish the thread with a hand-tied knot, burn it,
and then tuck it back into the same hole where it came from
so it will actually hold and then close the leather over it.
So it's locking, essentially,
that stitch inside of the leather.
The hand stitching element is something
that makes our bags pretty special.
After it's turned and burned,
we'll go back to painting and buffing.
And then it would all go to assembly.
Assembly station is where they are gluing
and assembling the bags from
the two-dimensional pieces into the three-dimensional.
And there's different levels of that.
They will take all of the gussets
and all of the partitions, glue them,
and then they hammer it.
There's kind of a lot of back and forth
between those stations until it's done.
It goes back to grinding,
and then back to painting,
and then does the full loop all the way again,
and it does that about five times
before the bag is finished.
The very last thing that we do is monogramming the bags.
And then we hand-write a note,
and then there's a card that goes in
every bag that has the bag number.
It's put in a beautiful gift box.
That's the last step before the bag is shipped out.
It's important that everything is made here.
It's about accountability.
It's accountability to our customers.
It's making sure that we are doing things
the way that we say that we're doing it
and watching every step of the way.
And we really couldn't do that if we weren't making it here
and making it ourselves,
and we can really say that we look at every single piece
and make sure that it's perfect before it goes out the door.
We're not just a marketing company,
but we're actually, we're a maker company.