A streetwear label came first, and it needed one leather accessory to go with the clothes. Marco Lazzaroni asked a friend who worked as a saddler to make it. What came back was wrong on both counts, the quality and the design. He went back to the same friend for pieces of leather, then bought needles, thread, a cutter and an awl and set up a small work table in his living room. The first thing he finished there was a card holder. It was the exact moment he fell in love with the material leather.

Every piece starts on paper. There are no 3D files and no computer models; he pictures the piece, then draws the pattern by hand, the old way, with a ruler, a set square and a compass, and the measurements have to be right to the millimetre. The first one gets made, tested, studied and reworked before it counts as a product. Then the leather is cut and stitched entirely by hand, in the traditional saddler's technique, no machinery, and the edges are burnished, smoothed and treated. It is vegetable tanned leather from Tuscany, which carries its own markings and small variations in shade.

Nothing is made before the order for it exists. Mendrisio, by his account, is a really small town with little passing trade, so the showroom stays small and the work arrives through the website instead. He says he only needs one thing from outside, a leather supplier who keeps producing leather. When the company Punkt wanted a case for its MP01 and MP02 minimalist phones, that case was cut and stitched in his Ticino atelier, on the same terms as everything else.