Threaded Leather is an accessories brand founded in Provo, Utah, in 2015. It is headquartered in Sandy, Utah.
Threaded Leather started with a watch its founder could not afford to replace. James was a college student with a Seiko SKX007 he wore every day, and a brother at a high-end jewelry store who told him to change the strap instead. The brother added one more instruction: look for Horween leather. That advice is now a workshop in Sandy, Utah.
By his own telling, James was studying business at BYU and missing the physical work he grew up doing. Handmade straps cost a lot, and he judged that few of them earned it, so in the summer of 2015, in his college apartment, he bought scrap leather at a local leather store and set out to make one himself. The first straps were rough. He thinned the leather by hand with an X-Acto knife, and the stitch spacing was uneven. By his own account he wasted more material than he used.
The straps are still stitched by hand with braided, waxed polyester thread. The company's argument is that the thread wraps continuously around the leather instead of locking at a single point, so when one stitch breaks the rest hold. Each strap is made to order, and the shipping policy says most leave the Sandy workshop in 3 to 6 business days.
Horween, the Chicago tannery that has operated since 1905, was the first name James heard. The company now also buys from tanneries in Italy and France, and it says all of it is full-grain, minimally processed leather that picks up patina instead of hiding it. Its product pages describe the Horween leathers as having a pull-up, meaning the color lightens where the strap is bent or pulled. The About page adds that after a few weeks on the wrist, a strap will not look like anyone else's.
What changed since the apartment is mostly equipment and training. The company says it invested in proper skiving equipment, which thins leather by machine the way the X-Acto knife once did by hand, and that its strapmakers are trained to the same standards James developed from day one. Every strap is built one at a time and checked by more than one set of hands before it ships.
The company left Utah for a while. Archived copies of the About page place James in Arlington, Virginia as late as May 2024, and back in Utah, in Sandy, by December of that year. The Hudson sells for $70, and the Sierra, which is backed with a liner, for $160.
The thinning has a machine now. The stitching still does not.
Threaded Leather will convert any of its strap styles to fit an Apple Watch, a job that needs custom hardware and costs $15.
