Great Watches Deserve Better Straps

My first mechanical watch was a Seiko SKX007. I wore it daily and loved everything about it, but after a few months I wanted something different. As a college student, buying another watch wasn't realistic. My brother, who worked at a high-end jewelry store, told me to try changing the strap instead — and to look for one made with Horween leather.

That sent me down a rabbit hole. I was studying business, looking for something tangible to build, and missing the kind of physical work I grew up doing. When I saw what handmade leather straps cost — and how few of them actually lived up to the price — I decided to try making my own.

The first straps were rough. I thinned leather by hand with an X-Acto knife. The stitch spacing was uneven. I wasted more material than I used. But the process felt right, and every mistake pointed toward a better way to do things.

Every strap is hand stitched — not fed through machines, but stitched by hand from start to finish — with a durable, braided waxed polyester thread. Hand stitching is slower than machine stitching, but the difference is structural — the thread wraps continuously around the leather instead of locking at a single point. If a stitch breaks, the rest hold. No machine marks, no shortcuts, no glued edges.

Our process has changed a lot since those early days. We invested in proper skiving equipment, refined our edge finishing, and developed stitch profiles for each strap style. But the foundation hasn't changed: our strapmakers are trained on the same standards and techniques I developed from day one. They're exceptional — and every strap is still built one at a time, checked by more than one set of hands before it ships.