Brass and Leather Luggage Tag

Details

A luggage tag on a 3 mm full-grain leather strap with a solid brass buckle. Nearly every tag lost on a carousel is lost the same way: a moulded plastic loop snapped at the thin section, or a plated split ring opened under a sideways pull. This one uses a leather strap and a brass tongue buckle, the same fittings a watch strap uses, and it takes the same abuse. At this price the leather is where a maker saves, and the vocabulary is built to let them. Full-grain is the hide's outer surface with its pores intact. Top-grain is that surface sanded off. Genuine leather is a split from the lower layer with a grain embossed on it, which is the second-worst of four grades and is called genuine because shoppers read the word as a promise. Bonded leather is dust and offcuts glued to a fabric backing. A tag is small enough that using full-grain costs very little, so there is no reason at all for the other three, and it is checked by microscopy to ISO 17131 like everything else on this shelf. The card sits behind a leather flap rather than a clear window, so your name and phone number are not readable across a queue.

• 3 mm full-grain vegetable-tanned leather strap and body, ISO 2589
• Grain uncorrected, ISO 17131, never a split or a bonded sheet
• Chromic oxide nil by ISO 5398, chrome VI under 3 mg per kg by ISO 17075-1
• Solid brass tongue buckle, no split ring and no plastic loop
• Privacy flap over the card rather than a clear acrylic window
• Five spare cards in the box, 300 GSM uncoated paper
• Hand saddle-stitched in waxed linen, edges burnished not painted
• No plated hardware, no acrylic window, no moulded plastic loop
• Brass darkens to a warm brown outdoors and polishes back in a minute. The natural tan strap will do the same in the other direction, and neither is reversible.