What India taught us about a perfectly built bag

When my grandfather travelled, he took two pieces. A leather-trunk-on-wheels for the family — heavy, lined in cotton, smelling faintly of camphor — and a single soft duffel for himself, a gift from his elder brother on the day he left for Bombay in 1962. He returned to it every summer for sixty-three years.

The duffel still sits in our atelier. The leather has darkened to the colour of strong coffee. The brass buckles are dulled in the way only sixty years of pockets and palms can dull them. The hand-stitching shows the rhythm of a man who took his time.

When I began drawing what would become Völtz, that duffel was the north star. Not as nostalgia — nostalgia is cheap, and our customers are not paying us to be sentimental. I was after the fact of it: that an object, made well, could outlast the man who carried it, and look better at the end than at the beginning.

Three lessons from a single duffel

Take care with the leather. Take care with the stitching. Take care with the hardware.

That sounds simple. It is not. Italian saddle leather behaves like a temperamental child for the first six months. Brass needs to be selected, cut, and finished by hand or it looks like brass-coloured zinc within a year. Hand-stitching takes a single artisan three to five days for a duffel — and there is no machine that can replace the angle a thumb takes when it pulls waxed linen through a punched hole.

I tried to skip these lessons in the first round of samples. I was embarrassed by how long things took. I tried fast-cure leather, machine stitching, modern hardware that “looks vintage.” Every shortcut showed up at the eighteen-month mark — exactly when the customer would be falling out of love with the bag — and so the shortcuts went out.

A bag should look better at year ten than at year one. If it doesn’t, you’ve used the wrong leather, the wrong thread, or the wrong factory.

Why Sonipat

People ask why we don’t make the leather pieces in Italy or Spain, the way “real” luxury houses do.

The answer is selfish. We grew up here. Our atelier sits on a road that has run between the Yamuna and the Aravallis since the Sultanate. The artisans we work with are people we have known for years. Their work is as good as anyone’s in Florence, and the question — who — matters as much to us as the question of what.

There is a second reason. Indian travellers — and we mean the new Indian travellers, the ones who finally have the money and the appetite to travel like Europeans have for two centuries — deserve a house of their own. Not an outpost of a Parisian one. Not a discount line of a Roman one. Theirs.

That is what Völtz is for. Heritage, made here, for the people whose grandfathers also taught them about leather.

— Ajay Singh, Founder