About
LewisJohnBroo makes leather goods in Sweden. Wallets, belts, bags. Each is released as a numbered series of twenty-five pieces, then closed. The materials are chosen for how they age. The forms are kept plain. Copper, brass, hide and a certain quality of light: what the country gives is put into the object rather than said about it.
The house
LewisJohnBroo began with a simple objection: too much is made to be replaced. The idea was to make fewer things, in Sweden, from materials that improve with use, and to stop when a series is complete. The name is the founder’s own, written as one word, so that the work and the person who answers for it cannot be separated. There is no invented heritage behind it. What follows from that is a small collection, a slow pace and a preference for leaving things out. A wallet, a belt, a bag. Each one considered until nothing remains to remove.
What Sweden gives
Sweden is not a backdrop here. It is where the ideas come from and, wherever possible, the materials. Copper was taken from the ground at Falun for close to a thousand years; the mine is now a World Heritage site, and the metal still carries that history when it is set into leather. Brass, the alloy of copper and zinc, gives the hardware its weight and warmth. The leather is chosen for grain, and for how it darkens with time. Then there is the light: long in summer, low and grey in winter, it flattens colour and rewards texture. Dark blue, brown, the dull shine of metal. Nothing that needs a spotlight to be seen.
The making
The pieces are made in small workshops, in Sweden wherever the craft allows. Leather is cut, skived and stitched, and the copper mark and the brass hardware are finished and fitted the same way, one step completed before the next begins. Nothing is rushed to meet a date. If a hide has a flaw it is set aside; if a stitch is wrong it is unpicked. This is slow and it limits what can be made, which is the point. Every piece is examined before it leaves. Where a step cannot yet be done in Sweden, it is said plainly rather than hidden.
The series
Twenty-five is few enough for every piece to receive the same attention as the first, and enough for the design to be seen in the world. The numbers run in order of purchase and are given only to the buyer, never shown here. Every piece is delivered with a certificate that records the design, the series and its number. When the last piece has been purchased, the series is closed and does not reopen; a page marked Series Closed means exactly that. The design remains on the site, in the Archive, with its story intact. A later series may follow, under a new number, and those who have registered their interest are told first.