At Village Leathers we care about how our everyday choices - both in our professional and personal lives - affect our local community, our planet, and the world in which we live. 

We actively pursue a business model that is as kind to the environment as possible, with regular reviews of our methods and a constant eye for innovations that might move forward our brand commitment to sustainability.

We constantly work to minimise the environmental impact of our production model, always researching potential efficiencies and new developments in eco friendly materials, technologies and methods. 

While we don't deceive ourselves about the provenance of leather, we exclusively use by-product leather from only LWG (Leather Working Group) approved tanneries. The Leather Working Group is the world’s largest leather sustainability program. The LWG is a global organisation auditing and accrediting environmental best practices throughout the leather supply chain. Subject to European standards of animal welfare and environmental performance, LWG is committed to minimizing the environmental impact while encouraging sustainability and traceability throughout the full journey of your leather products. To us, it’s important that the leather we use aligns with our values. We want to create long lasting, timeless products that are as unique as their wearer. Alongside this, we want to ensure we minimize our impact on the planet, and offer all this in a product that is affordable for all. 

That’s why we go for full grain, vegetable tanned leather where possible. The leather is more expensive than lower quality options, but by using our super efficient manufacturing techniques, we can keep the prices low, and creating a product that lasts a lifetime is far more affordable than one you have to replace every couple of years. What’s more, when it eventually reaches the end of its life, it can biodegrade back into the cycle from where it came.

 

 

 

The Story

From humble beginnings, Village Leathers began in 1974, selling hand made belts from a briefcase on the streets of London.  A family business, Mark took the naive decision to take the company by the horns, with the intention of creating only the finest leather goods.

Fool.

Fast forward through the years, and we have become an long suffering market vendor in Covent Garden, selling our wide range of belts, bags and braces Jubilee Market. We'd love you to come and visit us to see how much attention to detail we put into our creations.

Still based in London, four lunatics rattle around our creaky Victorian workshop sweeping up pennies that fall out of the fuse box and watering the tomatoes on our shed roof. Being machine addicts, this place looks more like the set from an Evil Dead film than an artists studio.

Heritage to us means trying to figure out a mathematical equation to determine the difference of human girth since the 70's. Sometimes it means which 'Large' is the right 'Large'? And it definitely means that not all rulers measure the same distance.

But it also means uncovering 20 year old prototypes and building a Museum in your workshop to showcase them. And discovering that only you can make that bag because everyone else threw that machine away a lifetime ago. I don't think there's anything more satisfying than a product design being so old that it rolls back into fashion.

This is a truly strange place to work, but somehow we manage to pull it all together to make unique accessories that have our heritage sewn in. We wouldn't change a thing.