the bag has been in use for three years. the leather is darker now. the stitching has softened. there's a crease on the left strap from the way it gets slung over a shoulder. none of this was designed. all of it is better than what came out of the workshop.
patina is the word for this. it means the surface that use creates. it's not damage. it's not wear. it's the object becoming more itself through contact with the world.
this is what we're trying to make. not objects that resist use, but objects that absorb it. the leather we use is vegetable-tanned specifically because it takes patina well. it darkens where it's touched most. it lightens where it's exposed to sun. it becomes a record of how it's been carried.
most manufactured goods are designed to look the same on day one and day three hundred. the goal is consistency. we're not interested in consistency. we're interested in what happens after the first year, and the second, and the fifth.
there's something at cultural satire about the relationship between use and meaning — how objects accumulate significance through contact with a life. it's not sentimental. it's material. the bag that's been everywhere with you is a different object than the bag that hasn't been anywhere yet.
we make things in California. small runs. the kind of quantities where we can actually look at each piece before it ships. that's not a marketing claim. it's a constraint we've chosen because it's the only way to make things we'd actually want to own.
the bag will keep getting better. that's the point. California-made objects has more on the made goods we're working on. and the technical side has been writing about the design philosophy behind objects that improve with use. coming-of-age rawness is also worth reading if you care about this kind of thing.