A vegetable-tanned leather side, a double shoulder and a bag of offcuts laid out on a workbench for a beginner buying leather.
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Where to Buy Leather as a Beginner

ByPeter Joeseph 'Briefcase Maker' Kalafatis

Buy cheap to learn. Buy right once you know what right feels like.

Where to buy leather is the first question every beginner asks, and it comes with three smaller questions hiding inside it: which store, which piece of the cow, and what the letters after the price mean. Leather isn’t sold like lumber. Every hide has a shape, a thickness, and a set of scars nobody planned, and the people selling it use a vocabulary that sounds simple until a box shows up on your step with something in it you didn’t expect. Six questions cover most of it.

Video: Unpacking natural vegetable tanned leather bends, from Marcellino NY Briefcase Maker on YouTube.

That’s a video from my channel of me opening a delivery of natural vegetable-tanned bends. Opening the box is the first test. Below is what comes before that.

Where should a first-timer actually buy?

A leather supply house, a scrap bin, or both.

Hands unrolling a natural vegetable-tanned leather bend from its shipping paper.

Start at a real leather supplier, not a general craft store. On a leatherworker.net thread about beginner leather buying, the member fredk tells a new carver to walk into a Tandy store if he can, because the staff there are generally trained, and he warns that clerks at a general hobby chain often know very little about leather. That matters more than it sounds. A clerk who knows the stock will tell you a belly won’t hold a carved line. A clerk who doesn’t will ring it up.

The cheapest way in is scrap. Montana Leather Company’s piece on beginner leatherworking mistakes tells people learning the craft to skip the expensive hides and ask a supply store for the leather scraps it sells, which are offcuts from other work. In the same forum thread, chrisash points beginners to small vegetable-tanned offcuts online for practice.

Tandy has a store locator on its site. Weaver, Montana Leather and the others sell online. Either works.

My opinion: buy your first leather where you can ask a question and get a straight answer from somebody who has cut it. When I started there were almost no good tutorials, and I learned by trial and error, which is a slow way to find out which piece of hide was wrong for the job. A phone call to a supplier is faster.

Side, shoulder, bend or belly?

The cut decides how the leather behaves more than the price does.

A hide comes off the tannery floor and gets cut into pieces with names. Weaver Leather Supply’s video post on choosing the right cut lists them: sides, backs, bends, shoulders and bellies. Tandy’s page on its vegetable-tanned leather gives the short version of each. Bends and butts are the stiffest and most durable and usually carry the fewest defects. Shoulders are strong but more flexible. Bellies stretch more, vary in thickness, and suit small projects.

The forum agrees and adds detail. In a thread on shoulders versus sides, toxo calls the top of a side the most scar-free part of the hide and says the lower shoulder and belly run thinner and stretchier. Hags says sides give him the most square feet for his money, and he spends the belly on leashes and narrow straps. Back in the beginner thread, fredk is blunter: “Belly leather is a bit too stretchy for carving.”

A side is big, and it carries every kind of fiber from the tight back down to the loose belly, so it teaches you the whole hide at once. A double shoulder is smaller and cheaper, and you’ll see the numbers on both below.

I cut briefcases only from the bend, where the fiber packs tightest. Shoulder goes to small parts. The belly goes in the trash. A beginner doesn’t have to be that strict. The post on reading a bend before you pay for it covers what to look for once you’re holding one.

What do A, B and C grade mean?

A grade counts the scars. It doesn’t promise there aren’t any.

Macro of a healed scratch on vegetable-tanned leather grain marked with chalk before cutting.

Grades are a defect count, and each supplier writes its own rules. Weaver’s page on leather grades is the clearest I found. Its A grade “Allows for 1 to 2 small defects in the prime areas,” plus a few more outside them. B allows three to four defects in prime areas and six to twelve inches of damage or waste. C allows more than twelve inches of damage and color variation. Tannery run, which is how Weaver says it buys and sells leather, is a mixed lot: the page puts it at 20 percent A, 50 percent B, 20 percent C and 10 percent utility.

Tandy sorts differently, into A/B, C and D/E collections, and its page contrasts that with tannery run, where grades come mixed together. On the forum, tsunkasapa answers a question about “craft” grade by saying it is “more like C.” So the same letter at two shops can mean two different hides.

Read the grade page before you read the price.

For a beginner, C is not an insult. Weaver’s C-grade double shoulder in 7 to 8 ounce is described on its own page as having “lots of defects,” and the same page pitches it as a budget hide to cut around flaws or to test a design before cutting into something pricier. It averages 10 to 12 square feet. The page listed it at $61 and sold out when this was written. Prices move, so check the page.

My opinion: learn on C. Scars teach you to plan a layout, and planning a layout is half the trade.

Can you buy straight from a tannery?

Sometimes, in quantity. Most people buy through a distributor.

The big American tanneries mostly sell through dealers, and the minimums are the reason. Hermann Oak’s site, which gives the company’s founding as 1881 in St. Louis, offers a “Buy Direct” route marked with required minimums and shows five sides per order for its latigo. A forum member in the 2022 shoulders thread remembered the direct minimum as ten sides. Either number is a lot of leather for someone who hasn’t cut a belt yet.

So the tannery points you elsewhere. Hermann Oak keeps a distributor list for buying individual sides, and it names Weaver, Springfield Leather, Montana Leather, Maker’s Leather Supply and others in the US, with more overseas. That’s the honest route to tannery leather for a small shop.

Here is what one side of good bridle looks like at a dealer. Weaver’s listing for Hermann Oak bridle leather sides prices one side at $380, tannery run, about 21 to 24 square feet, and describes it as firmer and drier than English bridle.

My Leather Choices page lists the tanneries I use: J.E. Sedgwick in the UK, Wickett & Craig and Hermann Oak in the US, Grade A full grain. The comparison of Sedgwick, Hermann Oak and Wickett & Craig on one bench goes into how they differ under the knife. None of that is where a beginner should start.

Do you need the best leather to learn on?

I keep saying no. The evidence keeps arguing back.

A beginner's first leather belt and card wallet resting on the double shoulder they were cut from.

Everything above says buy cheap. Scrap, C grade, a shoulder. I believe it. I also inspect every hide that comes into my shop when it arrives, buy the top grade, and send imperfect leather back to the supplier, so I’m the last man who should be telling you that the bad stuff is good enough.

And there’s a catch in my own advice. In the beginner thread, Clintock says plainly that “an inferior leather is HARDER to carve than the good stuff.” That’s the trap. My opinion is that cheap leather is cheap partly because it fights you, and a beginner who learns on it can walk away thinking his hands are the problem when the hide is.

Montana Leather put the question to a test. In Do You Need The Best Leather?, Robert Little makes four tooled journal covers, two from Hermann Oak and two from the shop’s imported veg tan, and finishes them two ways. The post’s answer is that “it comes down to personal preference as well as cost.” Fair enough. It’s also not a yes.

My opinion: learn on cheap leather, but buy one good piece early, even a small one, so you know what the cheap stuff is failing to be. Otherwise you’ll never know which mistakes were yours.

What should you do when the box arrives?

Unroll it on a clean bench, in good light, before anything else.

Open it the day it lands and look at the whole piece, grain side and flesh side. Check the thickness at several points, since a side runs thicker at the back than at the belly. Look for brand marks, healed scratches, holes and loose grain, and hold them against what the grade page said you’d get.

Then read the return policy, because that’s what you paid for along with the leather. Weaver’s product pages say leather can come back within 30 days in its original packaging, and its bridle listing offers free return shipping on leather in the contiguous US, excluding panels, pieces and belt blanks. A buyer who knows the rule can send back a hide that broke it. My opinion: a seller worth buying from would rather take a hide back than lose you.

Before cutting, chalk the flaws and plan around them. The good bend goes to the parts people see and handle every day for years, the flap, the front, the handle. Scars go where nobody looks. The guide to full-grain, top-grain and genuine leather is worth reading before you order, too, because the words on the label matter as much as the letter grade.

My opinion: don’t cut the day it arrives. Look at it twice, on two different days, because the first look is the excited one, and the excited look is the one that misses the scar sitting right where the flap was going to go.

Sources

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