Geocaching Leather-man

I have been a full time leather worker since 1975 and a Geocacher since January 2006.

Most of this blog will be about our GeoCaching adventures so I’ll use this section to tell about my leather work.

It started in 1971, I landed a job in the engineering department of a branch of General Dynamics. That job required that I wear a suit and tie to work each day. The problem I ran into was, I had a 28″ waist and the only leather belts I could find in the local stores that came in that size either had ABC’s or Choo Choo trains on them. I attended a local art festival in search of a leather belt and I found one. The problem was, it cost $38.00.

That same day, I visited a local Tandy Leather store where I purchased all of the materials to make my own leather belt. When I wore into work the following week I ended up taking orders from several of my co-workers. I had no intentions of making a living doing leather work at the time. In a couple of years I had this strange feeling that this division of the main company was in trouble. I began looking for another job to fall back on.

Before the division was sold off I had left to begin a new business in the leather field. It started with the leather belts and from there it grew as requests from customers came in. It was a nice start but nothing compared to the launch of our leather web site.

In 1998 I was playing around with the free copy of Front Page Express that came with every copy of Windows and I built a very rough 4 page web site. I found some free web space and put it out there knowing it was purely a folly. A month later we had our first sale from that site. It was one of our leather handbags and I was shocked. It was time to add more products and see what would happen. We added our leather fanny packs, leather wallets and many more belts. The sales kept coming and I kept adding pages in an attempt to cut back on the 40+ art and craft shows I had relied on to make a living. Just about everything we stock is now on our site including the leather checkbook covers, cigarette cases and belt buckles.

It does become a challenge to keep up with it all and that’s where Geocaching has come in. A couple of times a month we close the shop and head for a few long hikes in the woods to take a break from the action and collect our thought. The hobby of caching came along at just the right time.