Going through my diaries this week I rediscovered a small business I started when we moved into our first factory in Williamson. We had a furniture upholster directly opposite us and I’d wandered over one day and noticed that they threw out HEAPS of leather offcuts. It was incredible. Huge pieces of leather that had the smallest defect were chucked in the skip. Heaven forbid that someone have any un-uniform marks on their fancy, expensive couch. One guy's trash is another's treasure so I grabbed a couple of pieces and asked if they wouldn’t mind collecting some nicer scrapes for me to play with.
Three weeks later they dropped off a massive rubbish bag full of leather - it was about 15kg worth of the most beautiful scrape you can ever imagine. It took me several hours to sort through it all to assess what I actually had. There were a couple of hero pieces that were almost a metre squared. Most of it was strips from the wavy edge of the hide which suited me fine because I was going to use that curve as a feature. After an R&D period I landed on a few designs that were going to use up the scraper pieces beautifully. With the larger pieces I planned on making use of all the amazing japanese leather sewing magazines I’d been collecting.
I had a stash of about 4 magazines, all completely in Japanese, filled with simple, elegant handbag patterns designed to be handstitched. I’d always been a crafter and spent most of the primary school years doing cross stitch so was familiar with a needle and thread but working with leather was something else.
It smelt good. You could cut it with the precision of a scalpel but it softened beautifully like fabric. Despite the fact that I didn’t speak or read any Japanese, their instructional drawings were pieces of art. Like all Japanese designs, they were simple, clean and efficient. I had so much leather that I went through all the magazines and flagged the ones I like so I could make them. I also really got into hand stitching. I had to go buy myself a stitching pony which is a rather strange apparatus that’s like a giant pair of wooden tweezers with a base that sits under your thighs when seated. It’s used to hold your work in place so you can use both hands to pull the needle through the leather. I also needed lots of tools and threads which meant I spent a lot of time and money at Lefler - a leather goods store only 15 minutes down the road.
It was never my intention to start a small leather goods business but it turns out that when you have that much free leather, it's silly not to. What started out as a hobby ended up becoming ‘Scrapecase’ as I continuously turned all the leather into something cute. I made bags, sunglasses/iPad/pencil cases, card wallets and wine holders with the goal of selling them at the Apollo Bay summer market over the Christmas break while me and Matt were visiting his parents.
Matt built me some display boards for hanging the bags and tables out of ply for my stall and my mother-in-law Maureen was going to be my sales assistant. I literally had over 100 pieces to sell and was spending an insane amount of time riding the pony leading up to the market in the anticipation of selling them all to make my fortune. The day of the market was perfect, the sun was out, there was a buzz about town with tourists starting to emerge from their batches and AirBNB’s to mooch around on their Saturday morning.
I was secretly hoping that I’d sell everything because by this stage I’d almost been neglecting my paid design work to get everything made. What I hoped would be an influx of customers was a very slow trickle of mildly interested people. I eventually sold most of my big bags which I’d priced between $50-$75 but as the day drew on, I didn’t really sell much else. Maybe a few sunglasses cases or a wallet or two but by the end of the day I still had sold so little that I was going to have to do another day to get rid of stock. Poor Maureen was doing so well to keep my spirits up and to be honest, spending the day hanging out with her was probably the best part of it because the hourly rate for all the work I’d done would’ve been close to $2 per hour! I tried to go online but I sold maybe 4 items total. I still have about 30 card wallets and 20 sunglasses cases in a box somewhere and that is after I oversaturated family members with small leather goods as birthday presents over the years.
The big bags were obviously the winners on the day but my product wasn’t really the right vibe for the market. Maybe I would’ve done better at an inner city designer slash craft market where people were willing to take a bit more of a risk. I’d almost completely forgotten about Scrapecase but it's a good reminder to balance your expectations with outcomes. In the same breath there is no point starting a project unless you believe it's going to succeed, I think it's just finding peace in the outcome either way.
This is where I’m sitting with my book right now. I’ve written at about 12,000 words which is amazing but once I’ve hit my goal of 60,000, I have no idea how long the next phase will be. I might have to rewrite 30,000 words of it and that could be a relatively good outcome. Then I have to typeset it and get it proofread. There is so much work ahead still and I might only sell 10 copies to my family and friends. I question this outcome when I’m dropping out of the family to write my thousand words every night. Or feeling guilty when I can’t. Matt’s been out a few nights this week which means I had to miss a night or two because I was parenting solo.
The one thing that is motivating me today is that no one else can write this book. No one else has had the experiences that I’ve had. Perhaps no one other than my family and friends will give a shit. Maybe it ends up being something just for me. A reminder that it doesn’t really matter what the outcome is. Setting yourself an outrageous goal is more about doing the work than it is about the final destination.
