We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Brianna & Josiah Hanson. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Brianna & Josiah below.

Brianna & Josiah, appreciate you joining us today. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

Hanson Leather truly began out of a challenge from a friend to make myself a leather belt. With a little guidance on what kind of leather and hardware to purchase, I was sent down a path that has turned into the most fulfilling adventure. After many one-of-a-kind projects were created on the floor of my dorm room, I built up enough courage and experience to make Brianna a tote bag, which she loved. This bag caught the eye of a local shop owner, who invited us to be a part of our first market.

Bri and I were so stoked to be a part of this market. Seeing people come through our tent and freak out over products that we had made was the most amazing experience. After that day of receiving amazing feedback, meeting new faces, and experiencing good sales, Bri and I were both hooked. We came away thinking perhaps we could build something from this. Our love of the Scandinavian minimalist aesthetic helped us achieve the brand we have today as we design and create women’s bags and accessories.

Eight years later, we have more dreams and ideas than we know what to do with. It has been the best adventure.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

We are a husband and wife team who design and make leather bags and accessories. In our home studio, we craft each item in our collection with the purpose of creating a quality product that will stand the test of time. and be fashionable in the process. We want every item we create to have the potential to became an “heirloom” piece. This means cutting corners or using subpar materials is not an option. Our goal is that our customer’s purchase is worth every penny they spent. In the past few years, we have researched the best leather, hardware, and techniques to create products with the longevity of a lifetime or more.

As aspiring minimalists ourselves, we try to be intentional about the items we use and carry with us on a daily basis. Without this mindset, we find ourselves falling into the traps of maximalism. Since this is important to us, and many of our customers have expressed the same, it has become a major focus of our designs. Minimal, Scandinavian design is our game.

How’d you think through whether to sell directly on your own site or through a platform like Amazon, Etsy, Cratejoy, etc.

For quite a while, setting up our website was one of those tasks that seemed to big for us and kept getting put on the back burner. We knew that every month we went without one was opportunities missed. It wasn’t until the pandemic that we were pushed to finally make it happen. As each of our upcoming markets were canceled, so went most of our cash flow. It just so happened that our largest market of the year went ahead with a virtual market. This meant we needed to put together a website in short order. Even though websites are so much easier to build these days with he help of Squarespace and Shopify, it took the better part of a month to get it ready to launch.

We are thankful for this push to get our act together. Now we have a home to showcase our work, and share much more with our community through our blog section, “Coffee Chats.”

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

Learning to say ‘yes” to everything was the hardest thing I had to unlearn. As soon as people find out you work with leather, they begin to come to you with requests for items they have been dreaming of having made for years. The variety is endless and the requests span so many industries. (upholstery, fashion, home goods, kinky stuff etc.) From making an eye patch to refurbishing a mustang interior, the requests have been all over the map; and the most difficult response was “No.” If there is enough confidence to take on a project, it can be beneficial for a time . This helped us gain a lot of experience in the craft, but after a some time we needed to find our niche. Even after we had found it, we had a hard time saying “No” to custom work. This caused a lot of unneeded frustration and time spent on projects that we didn’t really love; which, in turn, kept us away from developing the niche that we did love.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.hansonleatherco.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hansonleatherco/?hl=en
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/hansonleatherco/
• Linkedin: n/a
• Twitter: n/a
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHSpVj82OrNHig3lDTa2upA
• Yelp: n/a