The most honest objects are the ones designed to be used until they fall apart — and then, ideally, to refuse to. Kenton Sorenson has spent a quarter of a century making exactly those.
From the barber's chair to the workbench
Raised in northern Minnesota and today based in Cottage Grove, Wisconsin, Sorenson is a classically trained barber turned leather craftsman, with a passion for the material that colleagues describe as contagious — enough to have earned him a place in “best of” features in both GQ US and Esquire UK. But the origin is humbler than any magazine spread. Necessity being the mother of invention, his appreciation for vegetable-tanned leather began more than twenty-five years ago with a single object: a case he made to protect his hair shears.
One object as a standard
That first case is the key to everything that followed. It stayed in daily use for decades, improving with age, retired only recently — and every design Sorenson has made since is measured against it: the same durable, functional, unadulterated aesthetic. There is no ornament for its own sake, no hardware that doesn't earn its place. He works almost exclusively in vegetable-tanned leather precisely because it ages the way that shear case did — darkening, softening, taking on the marks of a life rather than wearing out. A Sorenson piece is bought once and, the idea goes, carried for thirty years.
Why vegetable tanning matters
The choice of tannage is a quiet philosophy. Vegetable tanning — using bark and plant tannins rather than chromium salts — is slower, more expensive and less forgiving, but it produces a leather that develops a patina instead of degrading, and that can be repaired rather than discarded. It is, in other words, the opposite of disposable. Sorenson's whole practice is an argument that the cheapest object over a lifetime is often the one that cost the most to make well.
Reading it again in 2026
In a market still flooded with fast, glued, throwaway goods, Sorenson's slow leather reads as a manifesto for buying less and keeping longer. He belongs squarely in the craft revival we keep returning to — the same conviction behind the framebuilders of Erba Cycles, the considered objects of our design coverage, and the broader return of the visible hand. A case for a pair of shears, still improving after twenty-five years: that is the whole argument, stitched by hand.