Rigu has been offering vegan leather camera straps for a few years, and over the past year I’ve been slowly learning more about leathercraft. It’s an interesting process which I’ve always gone through with an eye on eventually offering Rigu’s own leather camera straps after over a decade of importing and selling other brands.

I naively started out thinking “well, it can’t be that expensive.” I was kind of right, getting setup with a minimal leathercrafting kit isn’t that expensive, but as with most hobbies, once you go down the rabbit hole there is always something else to buy.

I realised that there are certain things I can do, and certain things I can’t; and if I want to sell a high-quality product then I can’t rely entirely on my hands and eyes to ensure a good finish. Creating jigs and guides, or using machines where needed is key to offering products that are consistent. This in turn means that I should make less mistakes in the manufacturing process, which means less wastage, and ultimately lower prices for customers. It’s still a very hands-on process, but trying to remove some aspects of human error whilst keeping it a “handmade” product seems like a good balance to strike.

The die cutter above arrived this week. It’s a big heavy pair of metal plates which your put your material (such as leather) and cutter between, pull the lever, listen for the satisfying cut, and then you’ve got a perfectly shaped piece of leather for your project. For something like camera straps where there’s quite a lot of repetition between products I can see this being really useful.

Whilst I’m having fun playing around with this die cutter and the new cutting method it brings to the workshop, really this is an investment in providing more value to customers when I eventually begin to offer in-house leather camera straps at Rigu.