leather watch strap being hand stitched. Traditional leatherwork

Who Am I?

I was given my first wrist watch when I was 10 years old. I can clearly remember Christmas morning in 1976, opening a present to find inside a beautiful Commodore “Sport Time Master LED”. I was overjoyed, and so proud to own that watch. Over the years my fascination with watches has remained, and forty years on I still get excited by them.

I started making watch straps purely as a hobby back in 2006. My early attempts weren’t exactly beautiful, but I found the process of building a strap by hand relaxing and I enjoyed wearing them so I persevered. Over the next few months I learned a lot about working with leather and towards the end of 2006 I was asked by a friend if I would make a strap for his Panerai. This was my first true commission.

Over the next 6 months I made straps whenever I had the time. Mostly I made straps for myself, but by now I was receiving emails from other watch collectors asking if I would make a strap for them too. Then in summer 2007 I was made redundant. This happened suddenly and left me with a lot of time on my hands, some of which I used by training with a master saddle maker. Towards the end of the year I realised that I didn’t want another corporate job and so I made a leap of faith – I stopped looking for employment and armed with a copy of HTML for Dummies I taught myself to build my first website, converted the spare bedroom into a workshop, and launched Toshi Straps as a business in January 2008.

In 2013 I left London and moved to the west country. I found a house in North Devon that I fell in love with, managed to convince the owners to sell it to me and I’m currently in the process of renovating it. I’ve converted one of the outbuildings into a workshop / office, and so after 23 years living in London I’m finally in the perfect situation for my work – surrounded by trees and green fields, and nature.

Over the last 17 years I’ve maintained a very simple principle – every strap I make is made to the very best of my abilities. I believe that attention to detail is the key, and I will never send out a strap that I would not be proud to wear myself. I still do everything myself and by hand – no part of the process is out-sourced to anyone else and no machines are used. I don’t take short cuts – this means that there is a waiting list for one of my straps, but when your strap arrives I am certain my attention to detail will be obvious and you will agree that the wait was worthwhile.

“Short cuts make long delays.”

– J.R.R.Tolkein

Every strap I have ever made has been hand stitched. Some people might wonder why I have always resisted the temptation to machine stitch my straps.

I’ve made thousands of straps since I started back in 2006, and after all that practice it still takes me a good 2 hours to build a watch strap from scratch. Of all the various processes involved, it’s hand stitching that takes the lions share (approx 45 minutes per strap), so investing in a sewing machine that could do it in 5 minutes would certainly make economic sense.

The fact is that I believe that a hand sewn strap is superior to one sewn by machine. It’s as simple as that, and because I take pride in my work and want my straps to last I will continue to take that extra time to produce a superior strap for my customers, even though it limits the number of straps I can make each month. Most of my competitors machine stitch the straps they make, but I believe that hand stitching is central to the idea of a hand made leather strap.

When sewing a strap I use a 4-ply waxed linen thread and traditional saddle stitch – used by saddle & strap makers for centuries. The process involves sewing the leather with one piece of thread but with two needles simultaneously – the first stitch is the main stitch, and the second locks the first stitch in place. This means that if any stitch was to be cut the seam will not unravel the way a machine stitched strap will .

It’s a time consuming process but regardless of what my competitors decide to do, my promise is that every Toshi Strap will always be hand sewn, and always by me.

leather watch strap being hand stitched. Traditional leatherwork