How are Ateliers Fourès bags or wallets made?
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THE CUT
Cutting is a very important role in a leather goods workshop.
- It serves to supply all teams with the raw materials for manufacturing bags and small leather goods. The pace of cutting is very important to avoid creating bottlenecks in the subsequent manufacturing stages.
- Leather is a natural material that often contains numerous defects: scars, insect bites, loose grain, wrinkles, etc. The quality of the cut will strongly determine the final appearance of the product. Cutters must assess the quality of the piece to be cut and find the ideal placement on the hide for each component needed to manufacture bags and wallets. They must avoid defects and place minor flaws in less visible areas (under seams, for example).
- Leather accounts for approximately 25% of the final product cost. Therefore, the cutter must minimize the scrap rate to ensure the workshop remains profitable. They always combine small pieces to be cut with larger ones in order to more easily navigate around defects and prevent waste by discarding large pieces of leather. At the end of their optimization work, only a few millimeters of unusable material remain.
Each piece that makes up a bag or a wallet is cut using a die, with the help of a swing-beam press or a traveling-head press.
PREPARATION
The preparation involves 3 steps:
Step 1:
- Branding, which consists of printing the logo using hot stamping. Each branded piece is placed in a template to ensure printing at the exact desired location.
PREPARATION
Preparation involves 3 steps:
Steps 2 and 3:
- Splitting, which consists of thinning a piece of leather. Our leather measures between 1.4 and 1.6 mm in thickness. The leather parts of certain items need to be thinned. For example, all the leather pieces of a wallet are split to between 0.6 and 1 mm, otherwise the wallet would be much too thick.
Then, the split pieces undergo skiving, which consists of thinning only the edges of a piece. - Folding consists of applying a layer of glue to the skived area, then folding the leather over itself. The prior skiving limits the thickness of the fold and allows the leather to fold properly. This results in a clean, very resistant leather edge.
ASSEMBLY
First, the pieces requiring a turned edge are folded, as explained previously, in order to have clean leather edges. Then, all the parts (leathers, linings, reinforcements, etc.) are assembled together using glue or double-sided tape.
We have two assembly stations, each with specific expertise: the "handbag station" and the "small leather goods station".
At the handbag station, there are few assemblers, because there are few pieces to assemble. For small leather goods, it is the opposite, because there is a huge number of small parts that make up a wallet: interior panel, exterior panel, linings, card slots, flaps, coin pocket, coin gusset, bill compartment, zippers, snap buttons...
THE PIKE
Once the products are assembled, they are stitched in batches on a sewing machine.
Several assembly and stitching stages are often necessary and alternate in the manufacture of a product. Numerous back-and-forth movements therefore take place between assembly and stitching.
Here, the ratio between the number of bag stitchers and small leather goods stitchers is reversed. Indeed, the distances to be stitched on bags are much greater than on small leather goods.
THE FINISH
There you have it, your leather bag and wallet now resemble the final product. Well, almost! Here, we pay close attention to detail, and our finishing teams will take care of:
- Binding the bags: this involves sewing a ribbon around the stitched edges to conceal the layers of leather, reinforcement, and fabric for an impeccable finish.
- Turning the bags: most bags are assembled and stitched inside out, then turned right side out after being bound.
- Burning off threads: after stitching, many loose threads remain on the products. We trim them using a thread burner equipped with a heated tip.
- Attaching the shoulder straps.
- Polishing the leather: using a sheepskin, we buff the leather to make it shine and remove any scratches that may have occurred during the various manufacturing stages. Since this is leather not covered in pigments, the heat and friction cause the scratches to disappear completely.
- Attaching labels, boxing, and packaging the products.
It is during these final steps that we conduct a last rigorous quality check for guaranteed satisfaction…
Finally, your product is ready and waiting for one thing: to meet you!
