Lazy 3 Leather Co is an accessories brand headquartered in Ivins, Utah.
Lazy 3 Leather Co. began with a wallet that kept wearing holes in Todd Duke's jeans. He owned a trucking company in Colorado, and the big-box wallets he sat on through long days kept poking through his pockets, St. George News reported. The choice was to keep buying wallets or make one. He and Lucy Duke now run the company from a workshop in Ivins.
Duke had almost no leather experience, so he went to the internet. "For the most part, I learned everything on YouTube, just watching people and how they did it," he said. His first project used deerskin from a yard sale. He started on Lucy's household sewing machine, which turned out to have firm opinions about leather, so the couple spent the last of the trucking company money on a machine built for it.
The business was a basement hobby in Colorado, the Dukes say, until they moved to Southern Utah in December 2019. Lucy had been a newborn photographer who sold crocheted props on Etsy, and she put their wallets online. They sold 40 that first Christmas, St. George News reported. Booths at the St. George Downtown Farmers Market came next.
The work leans toward everyday carry now. The Dukes wet-mold their knife sheaths so each one holds its knife by shape, and they will build one for a knife you mail them. Their scout carry sheaths use English bridle leather from Wickett & Craig, which the shop calls one of America's oldest tanneries. Belts are cut in house from single-layer water buffalo hide in 8 to 9 ounce leather.
The honest note is in the catalog. Some listings pair a sheath with a knife from another maker, such as ESEE or TOPS. The leather is the Lazy 3 part, and the Dukes say every piece of it is cut, glued, stitched and finished by one of them.
Lucy also handles the graphic design, and her drawings become the stamps pressed into the leather. Some batch orders run into the thousands. When St. George News visited in 2022, Todd was working on an order of 5,000 strops.
He told the paper what he is after. "When I create a product I want it to be something they use daily that only gets better with age," he said. "Something they can pass on to their children when they pass on." Not bad for a business that started because a wallet kept wearing out a pair of jeans.
Lazy 3 turns its leather scraps into 3D animal keychains and even its own business cards.
