The case for vegetable tanning
Why we still do it the long, expensive way — and what changes about the leather when you take three months instead of one day.
Most leather you'll touch in a department store has been through a chromium bath. Three hours, soft, uniform, cheap. It does the job. It also looks the same on day one as on day five hundred, and it does not pick up the marks of where it's been.
Vegetable tanning takes weeks. The hide sits in a series of pits, the bark concentration climbing each time. Tannins bind to the collagen slowly. There's no shortcut for it.
What you get for the wait
Two things, mostly. The first is that the leather darkens with use. The patina you see on a worn wallet — the deeper colour around the corners, the warm tone in the centre — is the tannins reacting with oils from your hands and with light. Chrome-tanned leather doesn't do this. It stays the colour it was dyed.
The second is that it's repairable. Veg-tan can be re-conditioned, re-edged, re-stitched. Chrome leather rarely is, because the binders break down differently and the surface coating fights you.
A good wallet should be the only one you ever buy. That's hard to promise with chrome.
We use a tannery outside Avellino that's been doing this for four generations. Their hides take twelve weeks. It's why our cards leave the workshop with a slight stiffness that softens in a fortnight, and why the colour at month six isn't the colour at month one.
Stories, guides, and everything leather.