Attention to details

The Walnut, the leather and the bike: A story about the beauty of a handmade product.

Text: Silje Strømmen
Photos: Nicolle Clemetson, Austin Goodman, Erin Berzel, Robert Player & Russ Rocca.

- Geoff said it best: he said handmade means that someone has been paying attention to a product the whole way through. It’s more personal attention and attention to detail. There is a bit of the natural variation that happens to each piece. It was uniquely made, and that combination makes it oneof-a-kind, Valerie Franklin tells us from her kitchen table.

The “Geoff” that she refers to is Geoffrey Franklin, her husband and business partner. Together they make up Walnut Studiolo, a bespoke leather design studio. Since 2009 the couple have been selling their functional yet beautiful designs online, and in 2011 they both quit their daytime jobs and bet everything on handmade leather goods.

Their mission: To design durable, unique, and functional (awesome) products that they want to use themselves and that are handtooled in Portland, Oregon. The products are made out of durable natural materials like leather and wood, sourced with an emphasis on locally-made and USA-made suppliers and produced using environmentally responsible methods and materials.

- Our inspiration is just our everyday life. Everything we have designed here are things that we want and things that we use. It comes from a very practical place, which also explains why we have so bizarre different categories (including cycling, travel & games and whiskey & beer). What they have in common is that they are things that we wanted and things we thought we could design best.

The core of Walnut Studiolo are the materials they use to create grips, bar wraps, barrel bags, U-lock holsters travel cribbage boards, whiskey cases and drawer pulls: full-grain vegetable-tanned leather and full grain bridle leather combined with high quality wood (and yes, they sometime use walnut wood, without that having anything to do with the name of the company).

- Leather holds this unique combination of flexibility, strength and durability, and it was really because of those qualities that we chose to work with leather. Also, working with leather came natural to Geoff after having worked with horses and horse gear while growing up on a ranch.

Prior to this Valerie told us that Jeff thinks of the bicycle as the modern horse, a fact that only makes the connection to leather closer:

- The leather we use is high quality: American vegetable tanned leather is done the old fashioned way and it’s perfect for the structural applications that we have here. Being originally made for horses it makes sense that it would also be outdoors on a bicycle all day long. It was designed to be outdoors.

About two thirds of Walnut’s products are designed for the bike, and it was the bike that first got Geoff onto the idea of producing leather gods. Because he more than once forgot his U-lock he would restrain from going out for lunch during the workday due to not wanting to leave his bike unlocked at a street corner. Inspired by his beautiful Brooks leather saddle he created a U-lock holster, matching the saddle.

- Bikes are the center of our company. We started on the bicycle; it is a big part of our culture as a brand, for our costumers, for our fans and our followers. I think it represent our values in multiple ways. We believe in small impact on the environment, we believe in health, getting outdoors and everything the bicycle stands for is something this company stands for.

We take those values and put them into everything else we are doing, Valerie concludes.