Choosing a Hide: What We Look For in a Shoulder

Twice a year we drive four hours to a tannery that still runs pit-tanning, and spend most of a day going through a pallet of shoulders by hand. It is the least glamorous part of the job and by some distance the most important.

What a shoulder is

A hide gets split into three broad areas: the butt or bend (the back and rump, densest fibre, best for belts), the shoulder (neck and forelegs, firm with visible growth wrinkles, our workhorse), and the belly (loose, stretchy, good for linings and offcuts and very little else).

We buy shoulders because they hold structure well enough for bag panels while still being workable, and because the growth wrinkles across the neck are honest — they tell you it was an animal, not a sheet of material.

The three things we check

1. Where the marks are

Every hide has scars: barbed wire, insect bites, healed cuts. None of them are weaknesses once healed. What matters is location. A range mark in the middle of a bag flap is a feature. The same mark where a strap will fold a thousand times is a place we will not cut.

So the question is never “is this hide clean” but “can I fit my pattern around what is on it”. A heavily marked shoulder can still be perfect if the marks fall in the offcut zones.

2. Firmness and temper

We press a thumb into the flesh side. Good bark-tanned shoulder pushes back. If it feels spongy, it has been over-fatliquored to make it feel luxurious in a warehouse, and it will not hold a burnish or a wet-formed corner.

3. How the edge takes water

We wet a corner and rub it with a slicker. Properly tanned leather goes glassy in about fifteen seconds. Leather that has been rushed through the pits stays fibrous and furry no matter how long you work it — and an edge that will not burnish will fail within a couple of years.

What we turn down

Anything with a corrected or buffed grain, because the surface has been sanded off and sprayed back on and there is nothing left to develop. Anything chrome-tanned, obviously. And anything where the tannery cannot tell us which pits it came out of and how long it sat in them.

Why this costs more

Pit tanning takes six to twelve weeks. Chrome tanning takes a day. That difference is most of the price gap between a bag that ages and a bag that peels, and there is no clever way around it.