Following Scott Irvine through the Brave Leather workshop is no easy feat. The owner and designer of a Toronto-based company that produces over 100 styles of belts per season, he’s constantly on the move. I spent the majority of our interview weaving through aisles and past racks of samples trying to keep up with Irvine’s quick pace while he called out tidbits about Brave Leather’s history over his shoulder.
As the name suggests, the label is all about leather– which means that the workshop I’m jogging through has an incredible new car smell. In stark contrast to the bright white reception area, the workshop is a huge space with heavy duty woodwork stations and loud whirring machines. Irvine and I speed walk between stacks of cow hydes and shelves of buckles. Everything is imported from Italy in its rawest form for Irvine’s team to shape and design from scratch.
And from scratch they do. From slicing leather with a 75 tonne machine to punching holes in the belts, every step happens right here at Brave Leather in Toronto.
“We do absolutely everything,” Irvine says. “It’s not like they ship us belts and all we do is attach the buckles. No, every part of the process is done here by us.”
“Am I going too fast?” Irvine asks. And like any good journalist, I lie. “Nope.”
Celebrating their 20th anniversary, Brave Leather is a Canadian mainstay. Conceived by Irvine after four years of university (the first in his family to attend) and a stint selling belts as a street vendor, the company has grown from producing twelve styles of belts in year one to over a hundred styles in year 20. In addition to being on the forefront of trends, the label is an eco-friendly brand that only uses ethically made materials.
One of the most amazing parts of Brave Leather’s workshop is how easy the transition is between mechanical and hand-crafted work. “When it comes to creating, we range from using really high-tech machines to a very old world way of doing things,” says Irvine.
And it’s true. Directly across from a digitizing software machine (one of only three in Canada; the other two belong to Danier and Roots) is a station where belts are being painted by hand. Despite all the incredible work surrounding me, the people behind it are all very humble. When I ask how long it took to make an intricate belt incased in metal, the woman responsible winks and says, “Five to ten minutes, maybe.”
For such a business-savvy guy, Irvine is surprisingly hands on. Not only does he know exactly what every machine does, he knows exactly how to work each and every one. Even the sewing machine.
“For whatever reason, after twenty years, I still get excited to come here every day,” Irvine tells me. “I love to think of new ideas and come up with new ways to put together products that people want.”
With a team that consists of fifteen people working the floor, all experts in their own fields, Irvine knows the recipe for longevity in an industry that constantly craves the new and exciting: constant evolution. From designs, distribution, and even manufacturing techniques, Irvine makes sure his label is constantly changing and reinventing itself.
“You have to embrace that it’s always changing,” Irvine says. “That’s what keeps it exciting. Without that drive to always make it better, it would have been really difficult to make it to twenty years.”
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Bianca Teixeira writes about style for Toronto Standard. Follow her on Twitter at @BeeLauraTee.
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