Notebook paper. Somewhere around the beginning.
There are many pitfalls in starting your own company; that reality is usually packaged in hindsight as “learning.”
Ha.
Thirteen years later, that feels like an awfully polite way of remembering the early entrepreneurial rite of passage: fucking up, repeatedly.
And when you’re bootstrapping it, those repeated mistakes are expensive. Every wrong decision costs time, money, momentum—or all three.
Last Exit actually started as a branding exercise.
I challenged myself to create a brand from scratch as a side project. I didn’t even have a product in mind yet. I just knew I was a rabid fan of outdoor brands that seemed to stand for something bigger than the thing they sold. Names that carried identity. Stories. Places. A feeling.
So I started on a blank sheet of notebook paper.
Eventually, that exercise became Last Exit.
But once the name existed, I had a new problem: what was I actually going to make?
I landed in leather goods.
As a kid playing baseball and riding horses, gloves and saddles were simply the tools of our trade—so leather was always a material I appreciated. But as a consumer, I never understood the intricacies of the industry. I had no formal training in material science or design.
Enter the learnings.
Since starting Last Exit, I’ve burned through plenty of cash making the wrong decisions: patterns, dimensions, thread, tools, pricing, photography, packaging—and leather. Sort of a big one for this undertaking.
One thing I learned quickly is that buying leather as a consumer is surprisingly opaque.
With apparel, you can usually inspect the label: brand, country of origin, materials.
Leather is different.
Terms get thrown around—top grain, genuine, premium, bonded—and unless you spend time in the category, it becomes difficult to understand what you’re actually buying.
My takeaway became simple:
For Last Exit, full-grain leather was the only game in town.
The Animas Wallet - Dublin Horween at ~ four years of age.
Not because it’s the most expensive. Not because it’s trendy.
Because for me, it aligned with the whole point.
Full-grain leather uses the outermost layer of the hide and leaves the natural surface intact rather than sanding or correcting away its character. Marks, wrinkles and variation aren’t defects—they’re evidence that this material had a previous life.
More importantly, full-grain leather wears in over time, not out.
Spend time around horses and you’ll see stunning examples everywhere—boots, tack, saddles, belts—all made more beautiful through use.
That became the goal.
Not making something that stayed perfect.
Making something that could outlast its owner.
Something that felt like the opposite of fast fashion and disposable culture.
As I got to know my options in sourcing hides, one name kept surfacing: Horween.
The family-run tannery out of Chicago has been producing leather for generations and remains the longest continuously operating tannery in the United States.
Among many other products, Horween leather shows up in footballs, basketballs, baseball gloves, footwear and heritage goods. Once I started digging into the history of the company and its materials, I knew that was where I wanted to begin.
Over time I found myself returning to two Horween tannages in particular: Chromexcel and Horween Dublin leather.
For more than thirteen years I’ve used both across the Last Exit line of handmade leather goods—Chromexcel for belts, bags and Dopp kits where a little more weather resistance shines, and Dublin for just about everything else.
Wallets.
Accessories.
Everyday carry.
Dublin is a vegetable-retanned, full-grain leather known for dramatic pull-up, visible character and the way it develops patina over time.
Without question, Dublin became my favorite.
I love the way it changes.
From the feel—and smell—of a brand new wallet to a ten-year-old heirloom, few materials evolve in a way that’s this enjoyable to watch both as a maker and as someone who carries the products myself.
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