Frank Clegg Leatherworks: Fifty Years of Briefcases From a Fall River Mill

The briefcase in the photograph is black harness belting leather, cut with a double gusset and closed by a zipper across the top. It stands on the floor against the Resolute Desk, at the feet of the president of the United States.

In May 2013 the menswear site Off the Cuff identified it as a Frank Clegg Double Gusset Zip Top Briefcase and reported that Barack Obama had gone to a workshop in Fall River, Massachusetts, in search of an American-made briefcase. The site gave no source for that account. Clegg confirmed that the bag was his, declined to say how it had reached the White House, and told the site he was “humbled and honored”.

Later accounts repeat the story. The company’s own product page says only that the briefcase was the choice of a president who wanted an American-made one, and it names no one. Beyond Clegg’s acknowledgment of the bag, nothing in the record settles the question. The workshop is a different matter. It can be checked, and its history is longer and stranger than one photograph suggests.

Quick facts

• Founder: Frank Clegg, a Babson College MBA of 1974 (Babson Magazine)
• Company dates itself to: 1970, “family-owned since 1970” (company site)
• Eponymous line launched: 1974, according to Boston Magazine
• Workshop: an old textile mill in Fall River, Massachusetts
• Run today by: Frank Clegg and his sons, Andrew (leatherwork) and Ian (business and operations) (company story)
• Leather: mostly vegetable-tanned, aniline-dyed bull hide, tanned in Europe (company)
• Sold: mostly online by the company’s own 2024 account (Shoptalk), plus more than thirty retailers worldwide as of 2019 (Permanent Style)

Tools for Christmas, 1970

The company’s account starts with a gift. In 1970 Clegg, then in college, was given a set of leatherworking tools by his girlfriend, who later became his wife. The company’s story page says it was not a profession at first.

It became one after graduate school. Boston Magazine reported in 2013 that Clegg finished an MBA at Babson, tried corporate job interviews, did not enjoy them, and started his own line in 1974. His first large order came from a Boston couple who ran a boutique in St. Croix: $3,500, which the magazine put at about $20,000 in 2013 money.

The two dates, 1970 and 1974, are not a contradiction. One marks the first stitches and the other marks the first business. By the middle of the decade, the company says, boutiques and small shops across the country carried the bags, ordered through sales reps and catalogs.

What the 1980s did to American leather

Short version: it thinned the field. Babson Magazine records that Clegg once worked only with American materials, until hardware makers and tanneries began moving overseas in the middle of the decade. The company’s story page describes a late-1980s shift toward large brands and offshore production, and says many of Clegg’s fellow makers closed.

Clegg did not. He took on private-label work, and for about two decades kept his own line going in smaller runs. One of those clients was Cole Haan; Boston Magazine says Clegg ended that relationship after Nike acquired Cole Haan in 1988.

Some of the details from those years come from a single factory visit. According to Permanent Style, the family was among the first in the United States to buy a particular edge-dyeing machine, imported from Italy, and Clegg’s mother translated the Italian manual so the machine could be used. During one slow stretch, the same visit reports, Clegg also made guitars. A 2024 trade-magazine profile adds that his parents worked for him for about twenty-five years.

Two sons and a website

The next change came from the sons. The company says Andrew and Ian, then college-aged, built its first website, which, in the company’s words, made it one of the earlier online retail adopters and brought it an international following. Boston Magazine counted orders from Asia and Europe by 2013.

The numbers have moved since. In that 2024 profile, Ian Clegg put roughly ninety percent of sales through the website and other digital channels. In 2019 the company had no store of its own.

The brothers divide the work. Andrew concentrates on the leather itself and Ian runs the business and operations, with their father still mentoring. Om Malik’s 2015 interview describes a workshop that releases about fifteen designs a year and digitizes each one into a cutting guide, so a sketch drawn in the morning can be on the cutting table within hours. Asked about volume, Frank Clegg answered, “I’d rather make less product and make it better.”

Inside the mill

In 2013, Boston Magazine placed the workshop in a 5,000-square-foot space in Fall River’s Granite Mills and counted more than 1,000 patterns, with prices running from $200 to $9,000. Clegg had recently bought a computer-guided cutter, though many patterns were still cut by hand.

By the time Permanent Style visited in 2019, the company worked from the fifth floor of another old mill, with a boxing gym next door and retail on the ground floor. Twelve people worked the floor. Andrew ran the CNC cutter, one of the first used on leather in the United States by the visitor’s account, and Clegg described operators learning each machine’s quirks and leaving marks or notes on the machines. Belt work for a South American brand filled gaps and served, he said, as a training ground for new hires. Simon Crompton’s verdict on the building: “It’s clean, and it’s warm, and it’s well run.”

A 2024 account puts the company in the Barnard Mill with fifteen employees. The mills differ from one account to the next, which suggests the company has moved at least once. Permanent Style notes that the family had been in its building for only two years as of 2019.

The Herald News, Fall River’s daily paper, filmed a bag in production at the workshop.

A short film for Complex in 2013 looks at the workshop and the process behind each piece, with Clegg talking about his drive to get better at the work.

What the hide is, and where it comes from

According to the company, most of its leathers are vegetable-tanned and aniline-dyed, and shrunken bison is the exception, which is chrome-tanned. Hides are dyed in rotating drums for hours so color penetrates evenly. The leather page says the raw material is European bull hide, tanned in Europe to the company’s order, because bulls yield larger cuts for larger bags. No page reviewed names the tannery.

That distinction matters for the phrase “Made in America” on the product pages. It describes where the bags are made, not where the leather is tanned. The 2013 Boston report adds solid brass rivets and Swiss-made zippers. For readers who want the underlying differences, this site has covered vegetable versus chrome tanning, bridle versus harness leather and why brass hardware tends to outlast the leather.

The zip-top briefcase sells for $1,250 with a single gusset, $1,450 with a double and $1,550 with a triple, according to the company’s page at the time of writing. Items not in stock are made to order in eight to twelve weeks. The site calls its bags guaranteed for life but does not spell out terms on the pages reviewed. The workshop motto, posted on the company’s history page, is “Make it right, never rush.”

A bad shipment, 750 bags

The most telling story in the coverage is a small one. According to the 2024 profile, a delivery of leather arrived below the standard the company wanted. Rather than send it back or hide it in the line, the workshop cut it into about 750 one-of-a-kind bags, which sold out quickly.

It is a single anecdote from a single source, and the account does not say what was wrong with the hides or which year it happened. It still shows the pattern across half a century of coverage: a family business in a mill town that kept cutting through the closures, the offshoring and the move online, and treats each batch of leather as something owed a purpose.

How the briefcase reached the Oval Office floor, and whether a president asked for it, remains unconfirmed. The leather and the people who cut it are not in doubt.

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Sources

• Frank Clegg Leatherworks: our history
• Frank Clegg Leatherworks: the story of Frank Clegg Leatherworks
• Frank Clegg Leatherworks: our leather
• Frank Clegg Leatherworks: Zip Top Briefcase
• Off the Cuff: Frank Clegg, Welcome to the White House (May 14, 2013)
• Boston Magazine profile by Lindsay Tucker (June 4, 2013)
• Babson Magazine: On the Cutting Edge
• Permanent Style: Frank Clegg, Fall River factory visit (January 2, 2019)
• Om Malik, On my Om: Frank Clegg (January 2, 2015)
• Shoptalk Magazine: Frank Clegg Leatherworks in Fall River (May 3, 2024)
• Complex: Frank Clegg factory tour video (July 6, 2013)
• The Herald News on YouTube: A bag in production at Frank Clegg Leatherworks