There are easier ways to make a wallet. There are cheaper ways to make a wallet. And there are certainly faster ways to make one. After making thousands of them, I still choose to use vegetable-tanned leather because I genuinely like what it becomes over time.
Most of the leather I use at Dark Forest comes from Herman Oak, a tannery in Missouri that has been producing vegetable-tanned leather for generations. Veg-tanned leather is made using natural tannins, traditionally derived from things like tree bark, rather than the faster chemical tanning processes used for much of the leather you see today. The result is a leather with a natural surface that changes with use.
And that's really the part I like.
When a wallet leaves my shop, it's not finished in the way a mass-produced product is finished. It's the beginning. The leather will darken, soften, pick up scratches and marks, and develop a patina from being carried around every day. Your wallet eventually starts looking like your wallet. Two brand-new wallets might look nearly identical, but a year or five years down the road, they'll tell completely different stories.
I also like working with the leather itself. At Dark Forest, I hand-dye the leather before assembly. Once it has dried overnight, I condition it and start putting the wallet together. Edges are burnished, pieces are fitted and sewn, and everything is finished by hand in my Portland workshop. The natural characteristics of vegetable-tanned leather are part of that process. Grain, color variation, and small differences from one hide to another are things I don't try to completely eliminate.
Honestly, that's part of the point.
We've gotten pretty used to everything being perfectly uniform. Same color. Same texture. Same finish. Same thing coming out of a factory thousands of times over. That's not particularly interesting to me.
I started Dark Forest because I wanted to make things the way I thought they should be made. Good materials, straightforward construction, and a little patience. Things that don't need to pretend they're something they're not.
That's why I still use vegetable-tanned leather.
It's not the easiest material to work with, and it's not always the most predictable. But it has character. It ages. It shows where you've been. And when you carry one of my wallets for years, the leather eventually becomes a record of that time.
Like they used to make 'em.