Looking after a bag made from leather that already lived once
The first thing to say is that upcycled does not mean second rate. Our offcuts come from houses working to a very high standard, sourced through La Reserve des Arts. What makes them offcuts is their size, not their quality.
So the care is ordinary good leather care. It is worth writing down anyway, because most people do about half of it.
Keep it dry, and know what to do when you fail
Leather and water are not enemies exactly, but drying is where the damage happens. If your bag is caught in rain, do not put it on a radiator and do not aim a hairdryer at it. Blot the surface with a soft cloth, loosely stuff the inside with paper to hold the shape, and let it dry slowly at room temperature, away from any heat source.
Fast drying pulls moisture out of the fibres faster than they can adjust, and that is what leaves a hide stiff and pale.
Stuff it when you are not using it
This is the habit people skip. A structured bag left empty in a wardrobe for six months slowly folds along whatever line it happens to be leaning on, and that crease does not come out.
Loosely fill it with soft paper or a scarf, and store it upright rather than under other things. Not in a plastic bag, which traps humidity. A cloth dust bag, or nothing at all in a dry cupboard.
Matte and patent are not the same surface
Our matte hides show scuffs as a lightening of the colour, and many of those can be worked back in gently with a clean finger or a soft cloth.
Patent is the opposite: the surface is a coating, so it resists water far better and shows marks as visible lines rather than dulling. Patent also picks up colour transfer from dark denim more readily than matte does, and that transfer is easiest to remove the day it happens.
What not to put on it
No household cleaner, no alcohol wipes, no baby wipes, no saddle soap on a finished hide. If you want to use a leather product, use a neutral one made for finished leather, test it somewhere invisible first, and use very little.
In practice a dry soft cloth handles ninety per cent of everything.
Marks are not damage
Every hide we receive arrives with its own grain and its own colour, and a bag develops a surface over the first year of use. That is the material behaving normally rather than failing.
Where we would want to hear from you is a seam, a strap or a fitting. Those are made by hand by one person, in Casablanca, and they can usually be repaired rather than replaced. Write to contact@islistudio.com.
The story of where the leather comes from is in the leather has already lived once, the person who stitches it is in Tarik, and what a seam carries, and the bags themselves are in shoulder bags.