We recently connected with Sarah Heck and have shared our conversation below.

Sarah, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Almost every entrepreneur we know has considered donating a portion of their sales to an organization or cause – how did you make the decision of whether to donate? We’d love to hear the backstory if you’re open to sharing the details.

We donate a portion of the sales of our Park Series to the National Park Foundation, the official nonprofit partner of the National Park Service. A few years back we began traveling to trade shows as a major campaign to grow our wholesale business. Travel is extremely important to both of us, and traveling for work was a satisfying step up for our company. We began stopping through National Parks on our way to the shows, using the time to refocus on our friendship and our long term professional goals. We found that the scale and beauty of these places, mixed with the history of the land and lodges, put problems that felt overwhelming back into a manageable perspective. We had a mentor years back who is a furniture maker, and had figured out how to positively impact the community around him through his craftsmanship. With that spirit in mind, when we launched our Park Series we knew we had the opportunity to do the same. Though much of our work focuses on historic urban settings, Tactile wouldn’t be what it is without that consistent return to the Parks and all they stand for.

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?

Tactile Craftworks is a woman-owned and operated leather crafting company based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and San Francisco, California. Founded in 2014 by Sarah Heck and Anna Warren, we had been collaborating on hand-crafted projects since meeting in a theater prop shop in 2008. We knew we wanted to continue a shared aesthetic into a new project, and began by selling leather goods at farmers markets and local fairs. Since making the transition to wholesale in 2016, we now partner with over 200 retailers nationwide, and continue to craft each piece by hand. Our work is most inspired by the idea of place, and our emotional responses to both home and travel. We take pride in our methods of using modern technologies to enhance our traditional skills. We value quality, heritage, history, and longevity; working to decrease the disposable and give story to the ordinary. We strive to make pieces that are durable to use, beautiful to look at, and satisfying to hold.
We have spent the last decade honing our technique to balance detail-oriented artistry with efficient production practices. We are always expanding our Atlas and Park Series, but in the last two years we’ve focused on building our capacity for custom work, especially in the corporate gifting world.

How’d you meet your business partner?

Anna and I met on our mutual first days working as craftsmen in a theatrical prop shop. She specialized in molding and casting, fake food, and stitching; my specialities included fabric dyeing, bookbinding, and fake taxidermy. Our work tables were next to each other and we became fast friends, talking constantly while we worked. We quickly learned how well we collaborated, building on each other’s ideas and brainstorming without judgement. There was a postcard that Anna kept taped up near her table of a photo of her favorite bag maker’s studio, and we started fantasizing about a space of our own. Every summer we had a seasonal layoff when Anna would travel to Santa Fe to lead the props crafts department, and I started making leather tooled journals to sell at farmers markets for some extra income. We started playing around with ideas of products we could make together, but it wasn’t until an industry night at a Milwaukee museum that we learned about laser etching leather. This was the key to creating a scalable product, and we were prototyping the Milwaukee Map Journal there within a month.
A year later we launched a kickstarter campaign to purchase the first laser cutter of our own, and we’ve now made several major leaps together. Co-owning a business is very much a marriage- full of dependencies, accountability, creativity, confrontation, and trust. We’ve said it many times, our friendship comes first. That’s what keeps Tactile on track.

We’d really appreciate if you could talk to us about how you figured out the manufacturing process.

We manufacture everything in our Milwaukee studio. While we had a beginner’s knowledge of leather working, we both had an extensive background in prop making, which often requires one to learn new skills quickly and proficiently. Working in props also taught us to hold nothing sacred- if an idea isn’t working you have to be willing to modify it or scrap it, trusting that more ideas will come. Figuring out how to laser etch and cut leather took years of troubleshooting, but the biggest breakthrough we had came to the leather itself. We spent the first few years we were in business buying overstock hides from a local tannery, and collecting samples of the leather that etched the best. When we had finally built up enough business to place our first drum order (100 custom tanned hides), we brought our samples to the rep there who explained to us that they were all what’s called “crust”, a leather that doesn’t have a final finishing layer on it. This allowed us to etch directly into the surface without a top coat, and complete the finishing step on our own.
Manufacturing in house has presented us with several challenges and lessons along the way. Just a few years ago we booked a private lesson with the Chicago School of Shoemaking and Leather Arts, who sat down with our product and listened to our process. They were quickly able to see where we excelled, and where the inevitable holes were that come from being self-taught. This has become a keystone of our business- we believe you should start before you’re ready, don’t be afraid to learn as you go, and be humble enough to ask for direction from those who know more.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://tactilecraftworks.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tactilecraftworks/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TactileCraftworks/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/tactile-craftworks
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/TactileCraft
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC37qTRC1_bF68tuF5_BQGVQ

Image Credits
Photos by Brick Kyle, Aliza Baran, and us.