Moving from Insecurity to Healthier expectations as a Business Owner

Hello, my name is Liv McClintock and I’m a fashion designer, maker, wife, and mom. I live and work in Wilmington Delaware, where I share a home with my two favorite people in the world: my husband Bill, my daughter Katie, and my adopted fur-child Duncan (our three-year-old Brittany pup). I’m the owner of Town & Shore Handcrafted, a leather goods brand I founded in 2013 and I sell my products on my own website where I design leather fashion accessories and décor items. My main products are handbags and travel bags, but I also make belts, sandals, jewelry, and leather home décor.

What got you started in leather? :

I learned the basics of leatherworking in childhood. My brother made custom belts for himself because he didn’t like the fit of most store-bought belts and I would help him with cutting and buffing the leather. That was my first introduction to leather. My mother also loved quilting and taught me how to sew when I was eight. That skill carried over into the summers I would spend with my aunt in Wilmington. She had trained in the 1940s as a seamstress in New York’s garment district. She taught me machine sewing and how to use commercial patterns. That gave me a great creative outlet and allowed her to pass on her love of fashion to me. I still have the 1943 Singer foot peddle sewing machine she first taught me on. It was the first sewing machine she bought when her husband (my uncle) left for world war II. She told me that sewing helped her deal with the stress of him being away.

Sewing was also a skill that helped keep my wardrobe fresh through college while on a student budget, but I didn’t pursue a fashion degree in college. Instead, I studied Information Sciences and spent 23 years in the IT field; 18 of those were invested in growing an IT consulting firm I founded in the mid-’90s. Up until then, sewing had been used mostly for decorating my home and a creative outlet that I shared with fellow sewing friends. I never thought it would eventually become a full-time venture. After becoming a mom, necessity brought me back to sewing and coincidentally leather. I took six months away from my technology business for maternity leave and during that time I went searching for a leather computer bag that could fit all the things I needed for work, breast pump supplies, and still blend with the suits I wore to client meetings. Not being satisfied with the choices available online or in any of the shops, I decided to make my own. I drafted the pattern from scratch based on what I wanted the bag to carry. The finished bag started my passion for bag design and rekindled my love of leather as a material.

Leather is a timeless material that is so versatile and durable when cared for properly. Today’s products can last decades. Archaeologists have found leather sandals still intact in Egyptian tombs. I work only with leathers that are part of the existing major food industry. I’ve always felt that leather has been an important part of waste reduction in food manufacturing by preventing the disposal of cowhides in landfills. As a medium, leather allows me to do so many things depending on its type. A single piece of vegetable tanned leather can be molded into a shape, carved like wood, sewn like fabric, cut into strips, and woven like thread. It is truly amazing material. It’s one of the few materials that can be recycled from its original form and given a second life and sometimes a third life. Additionally, part of my effort to have a sustainable brand is in reducing waste while making and reducing the disposal footprint of my products. I feel better knowing that when our leather products finally do end in a landfill, it will take only 50 years to decompose, rather than the near 200 years required for plastic and vinyl. 

The Inkling to Sell

After making my leather diaper bag, I started making other totes in different colors for myself. That led to several requests from friends and family for tote bags, they were my first customers. Since I had already been an entrepreneur in the past, it didn’t take long for me to realize I could sell my work, so I started to give thought to how I could start a handmade accessory line. My business began when I was shopping for leather in Philadelphia’s fabric row and I started up a conversation with a local stylist that had clients in L.A. and Philadelphia. He was interested in buying the bag I was wearing and seeing what other styles I made. He felt his customers would be interested in my designs. That led to me setting up a website to use as an online showroom. With his help, I secured a couple of other stylists who wanted something exclusive for their clients. Working with a few stylists allowed me to wade slowly into the leather goods business.

And Then Came the Struggles

It didn’t take long to get overwhelmed trying to understand the fashion industry and how a handmade line fits into it. I consulted an advisor in the fashion industry but after a year I felt they did not really understand the challenges of a handmade brand. I still feel that way about the fashion industry, it is very singerly focused on large production runs and wholesale selling. The Handmade Seller magazine was the first place that seems to focus on handcrafted sellers and where they wanted to take their business.

My first struggles with my work came when my designs got more ambitious. It became noticeably clear that I did not have all the knowledge, tools, and equipment I needed to make designs I sketched. This is a struggle for many leatherworkers, and I am sure for artisans in other crafts as well. Once I started making bags with finer detail and thicker leather, I had to change my sewing equipment, improve my hand stitching, and learn to work with so many more materials I was unfamiliar with. I knew that it would take a lot of work but did not realize the biggest challenge would be finding others to teach me to use those tools and materials properly.

The first four years involved chasing down every bit of leatherworking and case-making knowledge I could find. This is hard to do in the US. Here, the use of traditional leatherworking has been fading for decades. There are no apprenticeship programs for leathercraft such as you would find in the U.K or Europe. There is still traditional leatherwork used in saddle making, gun belts, and western-themed products, but my focus was exclusively on modern design. I eventually found that a small community of modern fashion leatherworking still endures, especially near cosmopolitan areas with theater and movie industries.

My early insecurities about my products had a profound effect on my confidence in selling. It directly affected my prices and my marketing. When I first started doing popup shows I priced lower because I had only been doing leatherworking for a few years. I had not yet developed methods for accurately tracking my time and expenses for making each piece, which made it so easy to lose money on the items I was selling. I just didn’t realize it. After several frustrating popups, I talked with my advisor and he helped me realize I was pricing for the wrong type of customer and going to the wrong places to find them.

Creating Healthier Expectations

Another negative influence was the internet. The constant barrage of new products, designs, colors, and trends is overwhelming. It made me feel like I wasn’t getting my products out fast enough. It was my husband that finally pointed out the fact that my angst was often about fashion season schedules rather than my own output. Once I untethered myself from the idea that I had to follow the fashion industry calendar a weight was lifted. I realized then that the handmade market is simply different and that I should focus on my customer rather than what the big ‘fashion industry’ did.

Meeting other leather workers who applied the same techniques helped me temper my expectations. They created wildly different products and aesthetics which helped me realize that knowledge of craft comes before design. If there was a technique I wanted to master I focused an allotted time each day to just working on that and comparing results. That allowed me to build confidence in my craft. I came to realize that master leatherworkers all over the world are constantly learning and improving on their methods. I began to set better standards for acceptable quality that were rooted in the reality of the materials rather than perfectionism. This has helped me become pleased with my work and helps me enjoy educating the customer rather than just selling to them. Today I feel confident my prices reflecting the quality of my work and business efforts.

Today’s News

Covid-19 torpedoed my plans for 2020 pop-up shows! However, because I spent 2018-19 planning out what I wanted the next five years to look like, I felt confident in moving forward on some of my long-term plans of having a larger studio and a physical boutique. I signed a lease for a new studio/showroom in a beautiful historic section of the city. I began moving my business into the new space on December of 2020. I am so happy to finally have the space my equipment needs and have a physical space to represent my brand. My plans now are to link my online website to the physical storefront to create a cycle of marketing and promotion that will support sales on both. My goal is to give online and walk-in customers a behind-the-scenes look at Town & Shore Handcrafted and the work I put into it.

My advice to other sellers who are not valuing their work is this... Push yourself out of the comfy space of denial about cost. I hear so many fellow makers say they don’t include a decent wage for their time to make the product or they discount so much that they are working for free. Your business cannot survive that. When you do some real fact-checking about the amount of time, energy, and creativity that goes into making your products AND bringing them to market, you will see that your prices need to go up.

Subscribe to Handmade Seller Magazine to read the rest.