Sedgwick, Hermann Oak and Wickett & Craig on One Bench
Three makers of the same leather, judged the way a roofer judges three brands of shingle.
English bridle leather is a vegetable-tanned cowhide that has been loaded with waxes and fats until it is thick, stiff and slow to give. My Leather Choices page names three houses that make it, J&E Sedgwick in Walsall, England, and Hermann Oak and Wickett & Craig in the United States, and says I use Grade A full-grain bridle from American tanneries and imported UK bridle “depending on availability.” That last phrase matters more than any logo. A roofer with three brands of shingle on the truck doesn’t care which bundle has the nicest wrapper. He wants to know which one is still lying flat after years of heat on a south-facing roof.
Video: Hermann Oak Brand Video, from Hermann Oak Leather on YouTube.
Three houses, three different jobs
A tannery and a currier are not the same shop, and the difference shows in the finish.
Hermann Oak is a tannery in the full sense. ShopTalk’s profile of Shep Hermann says Louis Charles Hermann incorporated the company in 1881 to make upper, harness and sole leather, that it still works from its first site on North First Street in St. Louis near the Mississippi, and that Shep is the fourth Hermann to run it. The bark tannins come from quebracho and wattle. The firm skips the salt pickle most veg-tanners use, on the grounds that salt changes the leather’s character.
Same street, four Hermanns. That kind of thing doesn’t happen by accident.
Wickett & Craig began in Toronto in 1867 and now tans in Curwensville, Pennsylvania, in what ShopTalk’s Wickett & Craig piece describes as a former cheese plant of about 180,000 square feet. The company’s own site lists “Pit Tanning, Drum Dyeing, and genuine Hot Stuffing” as its standard for the premium lines. Leather out of a cheese plant. I’ve heard worse origin stories.
Sedgwick is another animal. Richard Farrow, third generation of his family in the business, told The Field in 2016, in a piece on Walsall leather, “We’re what is known as curriers.” Curriers take hides a tanner has already tanned and dress them. The Leathersellers’ Company, in a 2024 feature called Keep Calm and Curry On, calls Sedgwick “Walsall’s last curriers and finishing factory” and lists the hand work: sorting, shaving to thickness, drumming, setting out, drying, then buffing, colouring and greasing to a high shine.
Put the three side by side. One American house tans with bark and no salt, one pit-tans and hot-stuffs in Pennsylvania, and the English house is known for what happens to the hide after the tan. All three sell first to the horse trade. That is the saddler’s side of an old split, the one laid out in Cordwainers and Saddlers Were Never the Same Guild: leather built to carry load and be repaired, not leather built for a fine finish on a shoe.
The table, and what it leaves out
Five rows, all sourced, none of them a ranking.
| J&E Sedgwick | Hermann Oak | Wickett & Craig | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Where, since when | Walsall, England; 1900 | St. Louis, Missouri; 1881 | Toronto 1867; now Curwensville, Pennsylvania |
| Role named in sources | Currier and finisher | Vegetable tannery | Vegetable tannery |
| Process words from the sources | Pit tanned, hand waxed (retailer) | Bark tannins, no salt pickle | Pit tanning, drum dyeing, hot stuffing |
| Bridle weights seen listed | About 3.5 to 5.5 oz (one retailer) | 10 to 12 oz (Weaver) | 8 to 10 and 10 to 12 oz (one retailer) |
| My Leather Choices page | Open grain, high shine, hand finished | Thick, about 8 to 12 oz | Founded 1867 |
Don’t trust the weights row too far. Those are what particular sellers had listed on the day I checked, not the full range each house makes. Buckleguy’s Sedgwick bridle side came in two light weights, and the same retailer’s Wickett & Craig bridle strap in two heavy ones. Abbey England, Sedgwick’s UK distributor, sells Sedgwick leather by the millimetre, from stirrup butts at 4.8mm down to shoulders at 2 to 3mm. If you’re ordering for a briefcase, you ask for the weight the part needs.
The shelf won’t decide it for you. Neither will the side as a whole. I only cut briefcase panels from the bend, the butt of the hide where the fiber packs tightest. The shoulder goes to small parts. The belly goes in the trash, and leather that shows up flawed goes back to the supplier, whoever stamped it.
Price stays out on purpose. It moves with hides, freight and exchange rates, and any number I printed here would be wrong before the glue set.
What each one feels like under load
Wax, oil and thickness are what the hand meets first; stitching and edges come after.
This is where the retail copy earns its keep, because it says what the leather does on a bench instead of what it means. Weaver Leather Supply describes Hermann Oak’s English bridle as fully veg-tanned with a light oil treatment, a glossy grain side and a smooth, waxy flesh side, firm but versatile, sold around 10 to 12 oz. BestLeather.org, a leather goods review site, wrote about the Hermann Oak English bridle line after building a bag from it and described “a characteristic smooth finish with a hint of a waxy feel,” with slightly less wax than the firm’s harness leather.
My own page warns about that thickness. Hermann Oak runs heavy. Put a suede lining behind it and the wall gets thicker again, so I usually recommend keeping the natural lining. For a very thick, durable briefcase my page says to choose Hermann Oak and keep the edges traditional, burnishing them rather than painting.
Wickett & Craig’s bridle, per that Buckleguy listing, is drum dyed and then “hot stuffed with waxes,” with a matte, waxy top and a back that has been refinished and gum pasted smooth. Its harness leather, on Patina Project’s Wickett & Craig page, gets hot stuffing and jack glazing for a gloss.
Sedgwick’s character comes from the currier’s hand. Buckleguy says Sedgwick’s curriers hand wax and colour every piece and calls the waxy, open grain the leather’s most recognisable trait. Tsuchiya Kaban, a Japanese bag maker that buys from Sedgwick, says on its bridle leather page that the shoulders are tanned twice and then hand conditioned with beeswax and beef tallow.
None of that tells you which hide holds a stitch better. The saddle stitch cares about clean holes and an even pull on both needles, and all three are thick, firm veg-tan. My opinion: under a handle carrying a full case, the gap between these three hides is smaller than the gap between a good stitcher and a bad one.
Why the English hide looks like the real thing
Stiffer, waxier and greasier on day one; the bloom is the giveaway.
UK and US bridle are close. My Leather Choices page says both come from the same high-quality steer leather, and that the UK hide is stiffer and waxier, with a greasy top coat. In dry rooms and certain climates the waxes in English bridle rise to the surface as a haze. My page calls that bloom a sought-after effect that marks true English-style bridle, and says what to do about it: “You buff it out with a cloth and oil conditioner.”
Tsuchiya Kaban handles the bloom the same way from the other side of the world. It calls it a soft white haze, says it can be brushed off or polished back in, and warns it can come back after long storage when the temperature swings.
The care differs too. My Leather Care page explains that the UK hide arrives with that greasy top coat from the tannery, so feeding waits until the coat fades and dries. American bridle has no such coat and takes conditioner sooner.
On day one the English hide shines harder, carries more wax and grease, and fights your thumbs when you try to bend it. It takes a long time to break in. The American hide gives up its color faster, goes to patina sooner, and hides a greasy fingerprint better than the English one does. It looks like what people picture when they say bridle. For a buyer standing over three samples that is a strong pull, and not a foolish one. The bloom is real, the hand finishing is real, and the Leathersellers say the best British bridles are still prized in markets like Japan and India.
The look on day one is one thing. What the leather is doing a few years in is another.
Where the difference narrows
Once the English hide softens and dries, it starts to resemble the American one.
Here is the line on my own page that cuts against the romance, and I wrote it, so I can’t blame anybody else. UK bridle, once it softens and dries, becomes similar to new American bridle. The extra wax and grease are a head start in shine and stiffness, and they wear down. What stays is the hide underneath, and that is the same kind of steer leather on both sides of the ocean.
Back to the roofer. Two bundles from two plants can look unalike on the pallet, different granule, different colour. Nail both onto the same roof, give them a few hot summers, and the only question left is whether either one curled, cracked or let go at the nail line. Nobody up there asks which one came off the truck prettier.
My opinion: that weakens the case for importing English bridle on finish alone. I’ll put my own bias on the table, too. I like the American hide for how deep its patina goes, and that preference is mine, not the leather’s. If a buyer wants the bloom, the stiff early character and the hand-curried surface, the UK hide gives exactly that, and nothing American gives it the same way. If a buyer wants a heavy, durable case for daily use over decades, my page already points to Hermann Oak with burnished edges, and the American hide goes into that bag without apology.
And then the harder thing, the one that turns my own argument around. Sedgwick’s history shows how thin the English supply is. The Field reported in 2016 that Walsall once had six tanneries and 19 curriers, and that Sedgwick was by then close to the only one left. The Express & Star said in 2018 that the firm went into administration with its parent group, cut half its staff, and was bought by a consortium led by Abbey England. The Leathersellers piece says the workforce is ageing and young people are hard to bring in. I just spent four paragraphs saying the difference closes with wear, which is true. It is also exactly the kind of sensible reasoning that empties a town of curriers, one practical buyer at a time. “Depending on availability” on my page is not a figure of speech.
Choosing by the part, not the stamp
Weight first, finish second, origin third.
Other houses tan by their own rules, and this blog has looked at a few: Horween’s single rule for shell cordovan and the Swedish tannery in Tärnsjö Doesn’t Advertise. Bridle is narrower than either. One recipe, a short list of houses, a job that began on horses.
For a buyer or a maker choosing among these three, the order of questions that follows from the sources is easy to say and slow to do. What weight does the part need, in ounces or millimetres, and who is actually selling that weight right now. Then how much wax and grease the finish carries, which decides how long it takes to soften and when it can first be fed. Then whether the bloom and the hand-curried surface are worth the wait for an import, given that the gap closes with use.
Leather Naturally, an industry group that lists Hermann Oak among its members, credits its veg-tan with good tooling, carving and moulding character. That’s a different job from a briefcase wall. Every one of these houses sells to saddlers, belt makers and holster makers first, and to a briefcase maker somewhere down the list.
Most of the people who order from me already know their tanneries. Lawyers and doctors walk in with a name in mind, sometimes two. Fair enough. Every hide that comes through my door gets looked over on arrival anyway, front and back, and a flaw a customer would never find for years will still sit in my stomach, because my name goes on the bag and theirs doesn’t.
My opinion, for what it costs you: once the panel is cut, glued and stitched, I can’t see the stamp on the back of the hide, and neither can the person carrying it. The leather doesn’t know what it’s going to be. The man with the knife has to.
Sources
- Marcellino NY, Leather Choices: https://marcellinony.com/leather-choice/
- Marcellino NY, Leather Care: https://marcellinony.com/leather-care/
- Jonathan Foyle, Keep Calm and Curry On, The Leathersellers (2024): https://leathersellers.org/keep-calm-and-curry-on/
- The Field, Walsall leather: where to buy the best (2016): https://www.thefield.co.uk/country-house/luxury-country-house/walsall-leather-where-to-buy-the-best-30858
- Express & Star, Jobs saved as consortium rescues historic Walsall leather business (2018): https://cdn-www.expressandstar.mna.arcpublishing.com/news/business/2018/11/13/consortium-rescues-historic-walsall-leather-business-and-jobs-of-a-dozen-workers
- Abbey England, Sedgwick Leather: https://abbeyengland.com/en-gb/sedgwickleather/
- Buckleguy, Sedgwick English Bridle Leather Side, London Tan: https://www.buckleguy.com/sedgwick-english-bridle-leather-side-4-5-5-5oz-london-tan/
- Tsuchiya Kaban, Bridle Leather: https://tsuchiya-kaban.com/blogs/stories/bridle-leather
- Lynn Ascrizzi, A Conversation with Shep Hermann, ShopTalk (2018): https://shoptalk-magazine.com/2018/11/02/a-conversation-with-shep-hermann/
- Weaver Leather Supply, Hermann Oak English Bridle Leather: https://weaverleathersupply.com/products/hermann-oak-english-bridle-leather
- BestLeather.org, About the Hermann Oak English Bridle Line of Leather: https://bestleather.org/?p=9702
- Leather Naturally, Hermann Oak Leather: https://www.leathernaturally.org/our-story/members/hermann-oak-leather/
- Wickett & Craig: https://www.wickett-craig.com/
- Liisa Andreassen, Wickett & Craig, ShopTalk (2018): https://shoptalk-magazine.com/2018/01/22/wickett-craig/
- Buckleguy, Wickett & Craig English Bridle Leather Strap: https://www.buckleguy.com/wickett-craig-english-bridle-leather-strap-pink-55-to-60-long-8-10oz-10-12oz/
- Patina Project, Wickett & Craig Traditional Harness: https://www.patinaproject.com/wickett-craig/traditional-harness
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