Marcellino NY
The Maker
How things get made, leather goods in particular.
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The maker
Peter Joseph, Briefcase Maker
Every Marcellino briefcase is made by one person. I shape it, I stitch it, I finish it. There is no factory line behind it.
Handmade briefcase making is a dying trade, and I am one of the few people still doing it the old way, as I say on the About page. Anyone buying one of these should know who is on the other end of the work. This page is the introduction.
The workshop
For years the work happened in Huntington, New York. That workshop is closed. A new one is going up in East Setauket, and the bench moves with me.
A briefcase built at the bench takes days of focused work, and orders have run on a lead time of six months or more. That sounds slow until you remember the speed involved is the speed of one pair of hands.
Stitched in the air
A sewing machine runs most of the leather briefcase trade for a plain reason: almost any factory worker can be taught to use one. Hand stitching is harder to learn and harder to do well, and it is the part of the job I will not hand to anyone else.
I sew in the air. The work sits in my hands instead of being pushed against a metal plate, which lets me get shapes and corners out of a briefcase that a machine cannot. The stitch is the saddle stitch, the same one that holds tack together under a 2,000-pound horse, and it is a stronger bond than a small machine stitch. A good one looks clean on both sides. The side nobody sees is where a weak stitch gets found out.
The longer argument is in The Art of Hand Stitching.
Bridle leather, chosen by hand
I use fine English bridle leather, vegetable-tanned, picked for grain, weight and character. Nothing else goes into the work. The options are laid out on the Leather Choices page.
Tilman Fertitta, Billion Dollar Buyer
Tilman Fertitta, the star of CNBC’s Billion Dollar Buyer, visited the Marcellino workshop in person and bought $140,000 in leather goods for his Golden Nugget Casino Hotels. The About page has the details.
What changed in late 2026
I no longer build briefcases with the center brass lock or the leather lining, because both take more time than I can give them. Older briefcases that still have those features are in On Sale.
I won’t be making these briefcases forever.