Choosing the Best Quality Leather

Leather tooling and engraving, only possible in vegetable tanned leather.

Choosing the best quality leather is no simple task, and there is no one "best" leather. A lot of people think of leather as something that exists on a clear spectrum with bad leather on one side and good leather on the other.

If you think good leather should be pillowy soft, flexible, waterproof, and free of blemish, you're gonna think I must buy some real bottom of the barrel stuff, because quality, full grain, vegetable tanned leather (veg tan) is none of those things.

The cheapest chrome tan leather in the world would beat my veg tan leather on all those criteria, but you couldn't make anything in my shop out if it.

The leather I have selected is absolutely the finest in the world for the purpose of engraving and tooling as I do on most of my products. It comes from Hermann Oak Tannery, the oldest tannery in the United States, in continuous operation since 1881, and widely sought after by craftsmen for its exceptional working properties. With a few exceptions on the very low end, no leather is just good or bad. Leather is good or bad FOR certain things. Instead of one spectrum from good to bad, leathers should be evaluated on a variety of criteria.

Leather can be soft and flexible or hard and stiff. Leather can be smooth or textured, it can be thick or thin, strong or stretchy, it can be waterproof or it can soak up water like a sponge.

All of these things can only be good or bad depending on what you are asking the leather to do.

Leather can also have blemishes, called range markings, or it can be free of blemishes. For some people a blemish is a huge problem, but blemishes on full grain leather are inevitable.

For some buyers, the compromise made to strength is well worth the guarantee of blemish free leather made by top grain, or corrected grain leather, but in certain use cases that compromise to strength can be disastrous. Blemishes represent a guarantee of the strength only full grain leather can provide.

Even the seemingly simple distinction between expensive vs cheaper is not always so straightforward as expensive is better. My clients have budgets to be considered. The best leather for the job is not always the most expensive. More expensive leathers may have advantages that are not utilized in certain projects. This makes a product more costly for no good reason with nobody but the tannery coming out ahead.

Even after you have picked a particular hide of leather with just the right qualities you need for your project, there is still more to be considered because not every area of that hide has the same properties. I go into this topic in great detail in another post here.

So what are you to do?

Unfortunately there are no easy keywords to memorize that will protect you from buying disappointing leathers. Understanding the terms I explain in my Leather Buyers Guide will help, but unless you watched a piece of leather-work being made from the start, there is no way to guarantee it was made from the best material for that purpose. Even the best intending young craftsman can ship inferior product without knowing it. For some of these things it takes years for the problems to become evident, and longer to figure out why and how to fix it going forward.

The best way to navigate all this mess is to find an experienced and trusted craftsman to do the job for you. I have more than a decade of experience navigating the world of leather as a professional and I am getting pretty good at knowing how to pick the right leather for the job, and I am unafraid of telling you when you would be better off finding someone else with a different skill-set who works softer leathers for your project.

To keep learning more about leather, leather types, tanning, care and maintenance, take a look at my Leather Buyers Guide.