With more and more people making handmade leather products, it is hard to avoid a mixed bag of good and bad: it is obviously a factory product, but it is called a fully handmade product; how to see through the phenomenon and distinguish the good from the bad?

Many of my friends have such doubts. Before that, we should first define what handmade leather goods are.

As the name suggests, of course, it is a leather product made purely by hand, without the involvement of machines. However, the fact is that 100% of all handmade brands you know or have heard of in the market use machines: punching machines, edge cutting machines, sewing machines, edge grinding machines, etc. This includes Tuya and Herz in Japan, MAKR and TANNER in the US and the most famous Hermes handbags in the world. Why do these brands that use machines still claim to be handmade brands?

Handicrafts are precious because they are not only creatures, but also part of one's life. Efficiency makes the times go by, but it cheapens everything, diluting the life that should melt in the commodity, like a watermelon that doesn't taste like watermelon on the street. If someone gives you a period of time in your life, it should be cherished.

Industrialized production is characterized by mass production and the constant pursuit of high efficiency and low cost. Therefore, even when using luxury goods such as LV and GUCCI, the best leather materials are low to mid-range compared to handmade brands. This is not only because of cost, but also because the high cost of top quality leather materials cannot meet the requirements of consistency in quantity and quality in mass production. They are also unlikely to be able to customize leather materials, sewing thread color matching, etc. for one or two customers, while small quantities of production make it possible to customize some of them.

Thus, the first difference between handmade leather goods brands and commodity leather goods brands is:

Small quantity production vs. mass production, bringing parts customizable vs. thousand packs

This explains why MAKR claims to be a handmade brand, but it still uses a lot of machines and only a few processes are made by hand. The question is, when machines are fast and good, why do we choose manual?

Emotion alone is not enough. With skill training, things can be done better by hand than by machine after spending more time and effort. This is the most typical place where hand sewing makes sense.

Riding stitch hand sewing vs. machine sewing

Without going into design, product promotion, materials and other processes, it is possible to distinguish between three types of leather products by these two points:

A, purely handmade: small batch production, hand sewing, such as some Hermes products

B, semi-manual: small production, machine sewing, such as mud house, MAKR, etc.

C, purely mechanical: large-scale industrial production, machine sewing, such as LV, GUCCI, etc.

With a clear definition, how to distinguish between hand sewing and machine sewing?

The easiest and 100% effective way is of course the same as the picture above, which is to cut a hole in the thread and pull the thread to try. The entire loose part is machine stitched and the part that is not loose around the edges is hand stitched using the riding stitch method.

However, this method is not useful for eggs

Since the characteristics of vegetable tanned and chrome tanned leather are very different, the following are the characteristics of vegetable tanned leather.

On the production side, the sewing machine is a needle which uses the force of the machine to pierce the leather, with two different threads running downwards. The margins and spacing are set and the stitches are pushed along the edges to form a circle. In manual work, the lines to be sewn are first drawn and then the leather is cut. Each cut must be perpendicular to the surface of the leather to ensure that the lines are flat.

The penetration should also be well controlled. 1-2mm of exposure is sufficient. Too much will make the front aperture too large

Then thread both ends of the same line with two needles and stitch with a saddle stitch. Different chopping, different lines and different techniques will bring different results.

Therefore, the main differences are:

1. single needle and double thread for machine, double needle and single thread for hand sewing

For some bags, especially belts, the front and back have different colors or thicknesses, so it is important to make sure that there is no loss of machine stitching and that the hand-stitched front and back lines are identical. However, if two identical threads are used for machine sewing, it is necessary to check the next point.

2. Machine punching with a needle and hand sewing with a knife

Some people will judge by whether the dumpling-shaped marks (wavy) are true, which is not certain.