Our products

Why the leather matters

01

Full-grain hide only

Every piece uses the outermost layer of the hide, where the fibre structure is tightest. It marks, it scuffs, and over years it develops a patina that is entirely its own. That is the point.

02

Vegetable tanning from Pescia

The hides come from Conceria Badalassi Carlo in Pescia, Tuscany, tanned in oak bark and chestnut extract over several weeks. The process has not changed in the tannery since 1956.

03

Hand-cut, not die-cut

Dominic cuts each panel with a steel rule and a Japanese paring knife. There is no CNC router, no laser. The edges are bevelled by hand and burnished with beeswax and a bone folder.

News & Announcements

2025-12-07

What actually happens to vegetable-tanned leather after five years of daily use?

Five years is long enough to expose every shortcut a tannery ever took. A wallet carried daily, a belt worn through four seasons, a bifold opened and closed a few thousand times — these are not gentle tests. The surface of vegetable-tanned leather is in slow, continuous chemical conversation with the oils, salts, and light it encounters, and after half a decade that conversation has produced something unmistakable: either a deep, even patina that looks like it was painted on by a restorer, or a blotchy, cracked surface that tells a less flattering story. The difference between those two outcomes is not mostly about conditioning routines. It is mostly about what happened at the tannery, sometimes years before the piece was stitched together.

Saddle stitch versus machine stitch: why the difference matters for longevity

There is a question that comes up every time someone holds a well-made wallet or belt for the first time and notices the stitching: does it matter how those threads got there? The honest answer is yes, and the reason is structural rather than aesthetic. The two dominant methods — hand saddle stitch and machine lockstitch — produce seams that look similar to the untrained eye but fail in completely different ways. Understanding the mechanics behind each method is not an exercise in nostalgia for handcraft; it is a straightforward explanation of why some leather goods survive thirty years of daily use and others begin unravelling at the seam after eighteen months. At Quasar Leather, every piece leaving the bench is saddle stitched by hand, and that decision has a specific technical rationale that is worth laying out plainly.

How to commission a bespoke leather bag: what to prepare before you write

Commissioning a bespoke leather bag is not like ordering from a menu. The process begins weeks, sometimes months, before a single piece of hide is cut, and the quality of what emerges at the end is shaped almost entirely by what happens in those early conversations. Most commissions stall not because the maker lacks skill, but because the client arrives unprepared — with a vague mood board and the phrase "you know, something classic." A maker working in leather has perhaps a dozen decisions to lock in before work can start: interior layout, exterior dimensions, hardware finish, hide weight, stitching pitch, edge treatment, and more. Each one affects the others. Knowing what to think about before reaching out is the single most effective thing a prospective client can do to get a result that actually matches what they imagined.

A bit more

The studio moved to its current space on Bermondsey Street in early 2019, a ground-floor room with a north-facing window and enough bench space for two people. Dominic works with one part-time assistant, Priya Nair, who joined in 2022 and handles finishing and dispatch. The range has grown slowly and deliberately: bags were added in 2020, belts in 2021, and a small repair service in 2023 after enough people started bringing in pieces from other makers. The studio does not do wholesale. It does not do drop-shipping. Everything ships from the bench it was made on.

Both sold before noon, and I had not expected that at all.

12

Years cutting leather in Bermondsey

1

Tannery, in Pescia, Tuscany, since 2015

6-8

Bespoke commissions taken per quarter

4

Handwritten cutting log notebooks since 2016

About the shop

Dominic Farrell

Founder, Established since 2014

Dominic Farrell trained as a saddler at the Cordwainers programme at London College of Fashion between 2009 and 2012, where he worked alongside instructor and master craftsman Peter Hollis. After graduating, he spent two years at a small atelier in Florence run by Gianluca Mori, cutting and skiving bridle leather for equestrian clients across northern Italy. He returned to London in 2014 and founded Quasar Leather from a rented bench in a shared workshop in Bermondsey. His early pieces were wallets and watch straps; the range has since expanded to bags, belts, and bespoke commissions. He reads obsessively about tannery chemistry and spends most Saturdays at Bermondsey Antique Market, looking for old brass hardware to strip and reuse. He does not own a laser cutter.

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The bag that gets better in ten years