We’ve been creating with leather for a while now. Sometimes it acts as a design accent, sometimes we enjoy experimenting with bold colors and patterns. It’s a material that we’ve always been fond of, both for its long-lasting quality as well as the premium aesthetic it lends.
Meet Classic Leather: our new collection of everything we’ve learned about translating leather into tech. For us, it was also a great chance to remember some of the most important qualities we try to infuse into our products – craftsmanship, quality, consideration, and balance.
Followers of our brand will be familiar with our dedication to material. With leather, it was even more important for us to choose the right partner; to make sure that they were up to par, not just in the quality of the finished product, but also in how its procured. Our partner is based in the Arzignano tanning district a few kilometres from Vicenza, Italy, supplying bovine leather to industries spanning footwear, nautical, automotive and garments since 1958. One of the finest Italian tanneries, they stood out to us because of a commitment to constant innovation in reducing their industries’ social and environmental impacts.
One sign of this was their Blue Angel Certification. The first ecolabel in the world, Blue Angel is a certification process that evaluates products across their entire life cycle, emphasizing concrete benefits such as the sustainable sourcing of raw hides and lower water consumption throughout the process.
Over the years, our supplier has also dedicated increasing investments to develop solutions aimed towards improving the tanning process’ like building water purification plants and reducing carbon dioxide emissions with four cogeneration plants at their facilities. They were also the first in the world to build a completely electric-powered industrial loader to handle hides, among other initiatives.
We’ve always designed with the desire to enhance how we all live with our devices within an increasingly digital world. To provide solutions that aren’t just functional, but really deliver quality that’ll last and a dose of personality to our most-used everyday products. With our Classic Leather range, we wanted to take that further.
Adapting soft and supple Nappa leather into typically utilitarian tech accessories was admittedly no easy task. We were insistent about not using any plastic components for a truly premium finish, and so our production process naturally involved a pretty substantial amount of craftsmanship and handiwork.
From forming its shape, sewing each side, and finally hand painting the edges, our leather AirPods cases demanded a great deal of mastery throughout. The result? A beautifully handcrafted addition to your everyday carry. With no two cases being completely alike, and the unique patina that’ll form from your own day-to-day interaction with the product, it’s a real carrier of individuality.
Wrapping our signature Drop Wireless Charger in genuine leather was a little more sophisticated due to the utility of the product itself. Besides hand-carving, skiving, then carefully wrapping the leather, it also had to retain the same technical functionalities as our original charger. Through rounds of readjusting and testing, we were able to achieve the same standard of foreign object detection and thermal protection to ensure safe, durable power for your devices every time. Finished with a laser engraved logo on the ultra-thin aluminum base and hot stamped slash on the leather, it’s really a balance of performance and design that we want to provide for our community.
Crafting the Classic Leather Collection was certainly a fresh challenge for our product design and engineering teams. But, we think the finished design speaks for itself: a range of everyday essentials that truly transform from purely utilitarian objects to refined accessories that add character to the products we’ve all become increasingly dependent on.
