The edges of the pieces are thinned down so they are ready to be turned, glued and stitched together by hand. Billingham has been at the factory near Birmingham since the 1980s, when “there were three pages in the Yellow Pages” business directory listing leather factories in the West Midlands town. It has gone from that to about five factories.
It is more like a cottage industry.” About 20 people, mostly women, work carefully and precisely in Ettinger’s factory – a site of leather goods production since the 1890s – with a handful more doing work from home. Robert Ettinger, the company’s chief executive, says the vast majority of its manufacturing process has to be done by hand. Ettinger began making wallets and sourcing leather items, and today the company supplies a range of luxury goods to wealthy customers, including King Charles and Queen Camilla whose royal warrants they hold.
The company’s bestseller is still a wallet, but they also sell leather pill containers, cigar cases, picture frames and various accoutrements for dog owners, from treat cases to dog-waste bag holders, all of which can be personalised with initials. The brand sits in a niche between the big label luxury and high street with a British hand-crafted leather tote bag for just under £800 compared with more than £2,000 charged by a big swinger such as Louis Vuitton. An array of machines resembling pastry-cutters are used to punch out leather shapes that are then glued by hand with a brush to build up each item with trims and linings.
The tiny seams around the leather edges are thinned down with a shaving machine, known as a skiver, and turned inward before being stitched with a sewing machine. Each piece is then carefully checked and trimmed using a scalpel and sharp scissors before being polished and wrapped in tissue paper. Gerry Ettinger, the founder, began by using an array of manufacturers before buying his original factory at the heart of London’s leather-working trade in Clerkenwell near the Smithfield meat market in the 1950s.
Robert Ettinger says: “When I was a kid, there were dozens and dozens of small factories, making leather goods, and they all specialised. One made suitcases, and one made handbags, and one made wallets.” As the area gentrified in the 1990s, the Ettingers decided to move and bought out one of their suppliers, James Homer in Walsall, established in 1890. It was then mostly making corporate promotional leather goods.
Staff were trained up and new machinery brought in to make the high standard of goods expected by Ettinger’s new international clientele led by the Japanese. Walsall has been a centre of leather-working from the middle ages. It was focused on saddle-making with more than 100 firms operating in the town by the end of the 19th century.
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