Lotuff Leather Blog | Handmade Leather Bags

Out of New England: Our Journey to Africa, Part I

This is the first in a series of posts on our recent trip to southern Africa and the journeys our bags took with us. We started in the coastal city of Cape Town, South Africa and made our way north to the deserts of Namibia and the preserved plains of Botswana, concluding in Livingstone, Zambia with a quick jaunt across the border to Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe. Along the way we snapped the stunning natural beauty of the African continent and used some of our favorite Lotuff Leather pieces. They're the bags we carried each step of the way - an affirmation that what leaves our New England shop stays with you all the time, becoming a part of your...

An American Story: The Birth of our Satchel

“I am so delighted to do this. It has been so long since I have been able to do this,” says Luis as he smooths out the leather front of a piece he just finished. The whole Lotuff team is crowded together, peering over the pattern maker’s shoulders to watch him wipe the bag down and put it on the desk for its first official viewing. It is a thing of beauty, a fully leather-lined single-gusseted satchel. It stands up tall and proud because Luis has intentionally made it to do just that. A few hours earlier, he was polishing its edges, a delicate process that can go ruinously wrong with one slip of the hand. Luis has been doing this...

Bag #199

Bag #199. Osterville, Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

Bag #A046

This English briefcase takes a rest during its owner Linhbergh's trip to Phoenix, Arizona. See this picture and others at his blog here.

Meet George Vlagos, the Man Behind Oak Street Bootmakers

When George Vlagos was a teenager growing up in suburban Chicago, his father John summoned him to be his apprentice during weekends and times off from school. John, a cobbler who immigrated from Greece at 18, made his son toil with his hands to clean, polish, and service shoe after shoe after shoe. It was an experience meant to sear into George the strenuousness of working with one's hands and the importance of pursuing an education so he could one day find a different type of work outside of the family business. Well, the plan didn't work out exactly as John had planned. His son, of course, did go on to graduate college and receive a master's degree. But those days...

Craft: A Grandfather's Therapy, A Grandson's Inheritance

Joe Lotuff assembling the train set he inherited from his grandfather. William F. Buckley Jr. is quoted as saying "industry is the enemy of melancholy." I'm reminded of this thought every time I think of my grandfather and the set of scale model locomotives he passed down to me. It was sometime in the late 1950s or early 1960s when my grandmother was involved in a serious car accident that planted her in bed for about a year. My grandfather took care of her and didn't leave the house much until she was better. During this time, he developed a scale model railroad. He would go every week to Henry's Hobby House in Worcester to pick up a new locomotive...