One would think working with leathers - calf, bovine, lamb, goat, sheep - just involves finding ones you like, with the right look, finish, thickness and feel.
Oh boy.
This year alone, I’ve visited more than 400 leather showrooms, booths and tanneries spanning from Italy and the People’s Republic of China — from the heritage of Italian tanneries, to the raw, abundant leather markets of Guangzhou, where skins move faster than conversation. It's a quite intricate, abundant yet efficient network - but more on that on another day.
Today, we're here to talk about the intricacies, and laborious nuance, of working with leather.
Everyone and their mothers talk about leather quality, with ad campaigns, sales representatives and branding all glorifying the quality of leather used in their product. You'll find "LWG Gold Certified" often plastered on luxury brand websites, to show they source leathers from reputable, certified tanneries with tracing reports and verified processing methods. But not only do very few understand leather quality, but even fewer understand the equal importance of leather behavior.
After standing in rooms stacked with thousands of hides — touching, bending, scuffing, folding and prototyping them — and having over three dozen samples made across multiple product SKU's, I've realized something fundamental about leathers:
Leather isn’t a material you “use.” It’s a living structure you have to negotiate with.
That’s why creating luxury leather bags for KIMIAS — with sensual curvature but firm posture — isn’t just about sourcing good leather. It’s about understanding how leather remembers, resists, and transforms depending on how you build around it.
The Myth of LWG Gold Certified or Premium "Italian" Leather
Most people talk about “premium Italian leather” or "LWG Gold Certified" leather as if the label alone guarantees a luxury result. Spoiler: It absolutely doesn’t. What actually determines whether a bag feels truly elevated is not only the quality of the production process utilized for that particular set of hides, but how the leather behaves under pressure: how it responds to shape, bending, stitching, heat, and time.
Leather has memory; once folded or pressed, it remembers. In a structured tote, that memory must be tamed, not erased. In semi-structured or unstructured leather goods, that same memory must be allowed to move naturally, without collapsing or tearing. It’s this constant dance between restraint and compliance that defines true craftsmanship.
In many ways, the construction mechanics vis-a-vis the leather can produce a luxury feel much better even on a "cheap" hide, than a high quality leather suited for the wrong application.
The misconception that one “good leather” fits all applications is exactly why so many first samples look wrong — they’re disciplined by the wrong rules.
Thickness:
Thickness becomes a tool of discipline rather than durability. In a luxury tote, leather must be thick enough to stand, yet precisely skived at the edges so it retains elegance. In a card holder, the same leather must be thinned almost to nothing without losing fiber integrity. Shoes require softness that stretches but doesn’t deform. Straps need grain density to withstand tension without stretching out of shape.
Temper:
Temper, or the softness or firmness of leather, determines posture. And it's not always one-to-one correlated with thickness. Name any desired thickness (e.g., 1.2mm) or type (e.g., grained calf leather), and I can provide you with leathers with vastly different tempers. A soft temper drapes beautifully but cannot hold structure, and even with a sturdy interfacing backing, will find creases over time. Firm temper stands upright but creases harshly and can lose sensuality.
For a brand like KIMIAS, which is built on an unending appreciation for the human silhouette, curvature, tension, and body dialogue, we require something extremely nuanced: leather that
- Has the correct tactile-sensory appeal. Meaning, it must look and feel butter soft.
- Has sufficient structural integrity and temper. It must hold enough form with quiet conviction to retain shape over time
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Has sufficient practical flexibility. It must retain enough flexibility to contour with the body and different use case scenarios in daily living. No one wants a cardboard box.
That can only be achieved through proper selection, rigorous and repeated testing, combined with leather engineering—through layers of hidden reinforcement, interfacing structure in the right places, heat-setting curves, strategic stitching, and balancing material memory with controlled tension.
Direction:
What most people never see is that leather has direction, just like fabric. Cut a north-south tote panel off-grain and the bag will twist or collapse inward over time. Grain alignment is a sacred rule in heritage houses; in fast-production factories, it’s an afterthought. Add to that the fact that leather reacts differently to glue, heat, and stitch tension, and you start to understand why luxury isn’t visual—it’s structural. Too much glue makes a bag feel dead. The wrong edge paint, or lack of proper multi-layer application will seed cracks. Uneven stitch tension across different materials, interfacing and exterior leathers cause puckering or "seam-rippling" that betrays the price point before a logo ever has the chance to speak.
Engineering:
A luxury leather bag is not just sewn, it’s engineered. Countless sampling, prescience that can only be developed over experience, time and careful strategic intent. To make a bag stand without feeling rigid is to sculpt tension. Interfacing must support without suffocating. Curves should be shaped through heat and pressure, not forced with straight seams. The best bags in the world across powerhouse brands don’t look expensive because of logos. They look expensive because they hold themselves like bodies in posture... through the test of time and all the daily vigors that come with it.
Predicting how a leather will move, look and feel after all the above - is the most difficult part.
With KIMIAS, we're not interested in making a product that doesn't produce a luxury output, that doesn't last, or lacks awareness of how it evolves and moves over time. We're building objects resembling body language. An item that feels alive, deliberate, and aware of its own silhouette. The goal is simple in words but complex in execution: soft to the eye, uncannily distinct yet familiar in for, with a resilient presence over extended time. That tension-balance only exists when you treat leather not as a surface or material, but as a character with predisposed instincts, desires and resistances of its own that needs to be carefully raised and integrated. And once you begin to understand leather this way, you stop just designing and making bags, but start targeting the right kind of leather before negotiating with it to arrive at its final-form behavior and body language.