There is a credo among makers who work in leather: build the thing once, build it to last, and let time do the finishing. Few people embody it as completely as Kenton Sorenson.
Raised in northern Minnesota and based in Cottage Grove, Wisconsin, Sorenson is a classically trained barber turned leather craftsman — a second act that earned him features in both GQ in the US and Esquire in the UK. His passion is contagious, and its origin is precise. More than twenty-five years ago, needing a case for his hair shears, he made one from vegetable-tanned leather. That first piece stayed in daily use, improving with age, until only recently retiring. Every design he has made since is measured against it: the same durable, functional, unadulterated aesthetic.
Why vegetable tanning matters
Most leather today is chrome-tanned — fast, cheap, chemically fixed in a day. Vegetable tanning, by contrast, uses tannins from bark and plants and takes weeks. The reward is a material that behaves like a living thing: it darkens, softens and burnishes with handling, recording the life of its owner in a deepening patina. A chrome-tanned wallet looks worst on its last day. A vegetable-tanned one looks best.
An argument against disposability
That is really what Sorenson’s work is about, and why it belongs in any conversation about how we want to live with objects. In an economy engineered around replacement, he makes things engineered around repair and endurance — goods whose whole logic is that you will own them for decades and hand them on. The barber’s discipline survives in the leatherworker’s: a steady hand, a respect for the tool, and the patience to let the best version of a thing arrive slowly.
Necessity, as the old line goes, is the mother of invention. In Sorenson’s case it was a case for a pair of shears — and a quarter-century later, it is still teaching the rest of us what good design feels like in the hand.
