We were lucky to catch up with Reid Graves recently and have shared our conversation below.

Reid, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. What do you think Corporate America gets wrong in your industry?

Unfortunately the standard for Corporate America is often mass production at the expense of a truly quality product. In a market where making the highest quantity of product at the cheapest cost seems to be the highest priority their is a plethora of consequences carried out upon the consumer. The vast majority of these are visited upon consumers when their products are made using inferior materials. Many massed produced leather goods are among the most egregious offenders. Products are made from knock off leathers, pleather, or worst of all “Genuine Leather”, which is the leather equivalent of plywood, being composed of predominantly glue with leather shavings a scraps. Customers are left to marvel when their wallet begins to disintegrate and their new belt begins fraying. These same customers seek alternatives that require them to sacrifice their preferred style for simple functionality. This is how modern dads end up with the velcro wallet while grandfathers from a bygone era are passing down their heir-loomed leather cases and satchels. It is enough to make anyone miss the days when their was a quality cobbler, boot maker, or tac and saddle shop in every town where customers could find the items they wished for at the quality they wanted from a person they trusted. While these traditional bastions still exist they feel few and far between; however, there is a whole new generation of craftsman that continue to make quality, personal, and affordable leather goods available to the wise consumer. Responding to the market and the times they no longer work from the traditional brick and mortar corner shop, but instead inhabit the digital space where they can interact with their customers and provide the highest quality in leather goods. Instead of stopping by the shop to chat and ask about a a particular item and build a relationship that leads to trust in their craftsman, these same interactions take place online and lead to the same result. That result being a customer having access to quality leather goods at affordable prices from a craftsman they can trust. At R&D Goods that is our goal everyday.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

In a market so saturated with inferior leather products we pride ourselves on providing high quality leather goods that are as dependable as they are beautiful. We had this thought in mind when we chose our logo: The Grizzly Bear. If you have ever seen one in its realm and natural habitat you are struck with a bombardment of observations. It is without doubt rugged, tough, and purpose built. It belongs right where it is doing exactly what it is doing, but above all that you are stuck with the absolute majestic beauty of it. With every piece of leather that leaves our work shop we strive for that same reaction. We want their to be no doubt as to its form and function as well as it’s durability, but at the same time be simply beautiful and worthy of time to just admire it on it own merits.

I’m Reid Graves and together with my wife Dawn we own and operate R&D Goods. Dawn and I have been married for 4 years and operating R&D Goods for two of those, and were are currently expecting our first son, Jubal. I am a high school teacher where we live in North Texas, and Dawn works PRN for our local hospital and the rest of her time is spent managing R&D Goods. Dawn and I make for a great team. While I am driven and energized by designing and crafting most our leather goods, Dawn is the business side keeping us rooted and squared away making sure all the bases are covered, deadlines are met and orders are shipped out with precision and attention to every detail. While she is at it, she is also becoming quite the craftswoman her own self getting involved in more and more of our day to day products.

As for me, I have always been drawn to crafting and creating. I dabbled in various mediums from woodworking and skrimshaw to some terribly misguided attempts at welding and metal design, but when I found leather, that was it. I spent years learning and experimenting. Their is a common adage in barbecue that “to make good brisket you have to just make a lot of bad ones.” Well I found the same to be true with leather craft, I look back on some projects with fond nostalgia and others with embarrassed horror, but at the end of the day it is just part of the process and I would hypothesize that most craftsmen would run through the same gambit of emotions when asked to examine their previous work.

R&D Goods launched from a simple Tote bag I made for my wife. It was simple, durable, rugged, and yet still beautiful. She immediately said that we should be selling them, and everywhere she went it grabbed attention. Before long we had quite a few people wanting to order one. We realized quickly that people had a deep desire for real quality leather goods that would last. We made a couple more totes to sell and used the money to fund my still “hobby” of leather making with more tools and supplies. I still experimented and tried various designs and would work on occasional projects for friends and family. But in 2021 Dawn finally convinced me we should make a go at this in earnest. We began working a solid plan and building up our catalog of leather goods. We expanded to include various wallets, bags, key accessories, desk wear, padfolios and Journal covers. In July of 2021 we launched our website randdgoods.com. Since then we have been blessed to see steady and consistent growth. We also began taking part in local vendor shows and farmers markets helping to increase our customer base. It never ceases to amaze me, however, that one tote seems to have been our launch. We have made numerous ones since in various styles and sizes, and Dawn has an over abundance of our many purses. Yet on a day to day bases after years of use, it is still that original that is most often slung over her arm, and if I can say so myself, it still looks pretty great.

2022 was by far our most successful year to date and we have great plans for expanding. In addition to providing quality leather goods directly to our consumers we are also providing them to businesses both for their personal use and for resale. While we enjoy providing leather goods to all, we love nothing more than to provide personalized products for other small businesses like ourselves. It is one of our favorite things when we get the opportunity to create one of a kind items. Partnering with other businesses to bring their ideas to life is one of the most rewarding things we get to do and we can’t wait to do it even more in 2023.

Any advice for growing your clientele? What’s been most effective for you?

Have you ever bought a product and been amazed by it? Hopefully so. if not, I have a website you should check out. After the elation of a good find what is our typical reaction. If you’re like me then almost as great as finding a truly quality product is sharing that find with those close to you. It’s a natural reaction, so much so that people have made careers out of finding products they love and sharing them with others. For R&D goods our number one focus is quality, and with that comes a marketing strategy as old as time and that is word of mouth. The combo of word of mouth plus time is slowly paying off. Almost without fail when we sell a product to a new client we’ll see an influx of similar products from their friend/family circle. Like all things in the digital age word of mouth has changed and now often take online. Word of mouth spreads even faster through social media. We take advantage of this by maintaining a presence on social media and encouraging customers to share their feedback. We say it a lot but for us quality is the most important thing, and that is absolutely a marketing strategy.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

According to Stephen Pressfield when King Leonidas was asked what he considered the supreme warrior virtue he responded “Contempt for Death”. Pressfield asserts that for the artist or occasionally the artisan the supreme virtue is “Contempt for Failure”. Failure is constant. We’ve had new products flop. We’ve had expensive equipment that we invested not only capital but our hope in as well turn out to be unreliable and let us down. We’ve had advertisements not generate a return on investment. We’ve had hours upon hours invested into a product design for it only to reach its inevitable end in the scrap bin. All of these things feel like such huge blows especially for small businesses with limited resources. In the end failures are just part of the process. It took me far too long to realize the idea of having “Contempt for Failure”. In fact i’m still not wholly there, but it gets a little better every time I suffer the pain of failure. Most of us spend our whole lives doing everything we can to avoid failure. We have a natural aversion that is constantly reinforced. Failure will never be something we look for, quite obviously that would defeat the purpose. It shouldn’t even be something we like. It should simply be something we can have contempt for. Something that does not cause us fear or dread, but an accepted part of running a small business. We hedge our bets against it we do ur best, but if failure comes it isn’t the end. There is next project, the next product, the next customer, and they will all go undone, unmade, unsold, and unseen if we let todays failures impact how we view tomorrows opportunities.

Contact Info:

• Website: randdgoods.com
• Instagram: @r.d.goods
• Facebook: R & D Goods

Image Credits
The pictures were taken by us. The image of the bag in the chair the the original tote we made referred to in our answers..