The Leather Man
It doesn’t take long to understand artist Michael Bluth’s commitment to quality, in fact, it only takes five minutes. That’s the amount of time it takes to walk into his Honolulu Arts District storefront and leave with one of his fully customized, freshly hand-sewn leather pieces. The smell of raw leather greets guests first when stepping inside his made-to-order leather goods store, Open Sea Leather Co., but it’s an overwhelming sense of ‘ohana that lingers in the air as shoppers are welcomed in further.
The space is all at once an old-world leather workshop and a commission-free art gallery, where paintings from local artists share wall space with wooden spools of thick thread and antique catalogs filled with swatches of full grain leather. Most people come seeking Bluth’s signature minimalist wallets — eagerly selecting their model, leather, and thread to create their own custom piece — but wind up leaving with more than just an everyday carry. And that’s because true art tells a story, and Bluth’s story began long before his foray into leather.
Growing up near the Wasatch Mountains of Utah, Bluth dabbled in fine art painting early on, but it was while he was on a church mission to El Salvador that he discovered what would become his true artform. “I kept wearing out my leather shoes while I was there,” Bluth recalls, “and it started getting expensive to take them to the local cobbler to have them resoled, so I just learned to resole them myself.” He returned home from the mission and, instead of jumping into a career creating leather goods, he swapped his handstitched shoes for a garrison cap with the U.S. Navy.
Bluth spent more than 11 years as a foreign language analyst in the armed forces, adding two more languages to his already bilingual repertoire. He was living on the Monterey Peninsula studying Mandarin Chinese when he hit burnout and needed a creative outlet, so, in 2015, he converted his garage into a leather shop and began creating again.
“Learning language in military life is very rigid,” he explains. “You work for a year and a half for a final test, but once you graduate, you’re not finished; you’ll always be learning. Leather, on the other hand, is so defined. There’s finality to it. I have raw materials, and, in a few minutes, I have a finished product. I take a lot of satisfaction in the creating process, and every task completed is very rewarding.”
Bluth started making bags and boots for friends and family before coming up with his first minimalist wallet design — which he called the “gun deck” — and started a side hustle selling his creations on Etsy. “Good design is trying to fix a problem, and the problem with most wallets was that most of them were bad leather with a bunch of stitching and most of them were boring.”
Bluth’s design was neither, created with the highest quality of sustainable leather and interesting angles and folds that come together to create a stunning wallet with superior durability. “We use a lot of folds instead of seams,” Bluth adds. “That makes the wallet more durable. Any seam is like a weakness, so we use folds instead and hand stitch everything with a saddle stitch, which is a series of figure eights, so you could even pop a stitch and the entire stitching wouldn’t come undone.”
The design was an obvious hit, and it wasn’t long before he outgrew his Etsy shop, so, in 2021, he retired his uniform and opened his dedicated leather goods workshop and storefront along North Pauahi Street. Along with his dedicated staff, Open Sea Leather Co. now offers 17 minimalist wallet designs and a series of other customizable leather goods. With just his wallets alone — which range from holding 5 cards to wallets that can hold more than 10 cards plus bills — there are more than 200,000 possible variations available once guests choose their model, leather, and thread color. It’s from his workbench in his store where shoppers can often find Bluth, listening to his customers with the trained ear of a linguist as he helps them make decisions that will guide them to create a piece worthy of holding their own stories.
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