Between the City and the Workshop

Most working days begin with the familiar rhythm of corporate life. Calendars fill up quickly, emails arrive faster than they can be answered, meetings spill into other meetings, and there is always another paper to write, decision to make or problem to solve.

It is work I care about and, importantly, work that gives me a sense of purpose. I am fortunate to have a career that is intellectually stimulating and which allows me to contribute to issues that matter and actually impact people's lives. 

But somewhere between the meetings, deadlines and glow of a laptop screen, part of my mind is often somewhere else entirely. Usually, it is back at the workbench, thinking about a piece of leather waiting to be cut, a pattern I have been refining, an edge that still needs sanding, or a row of stitching that I want to finish.

That contrast between corporate work and the workshop is one of the things that has come to define my life over the past couple of years. By day, most of my work exists in the world of ideas, strategy, writing and discussion. Progress can be slow, difficult to measure and often only visible after months of work.

You can spend an entire day thinking intensely, speaking to people and producing something worthwhile, yet still leave with nothing tangible in your hands.

Leathercraft is almost the exact opposite. It begins with a material in front of you and, slowly, through a series of deliberate actions, becomes something real. You mark out a pattern, cut the leather, thin the edges, punch the stitching holes, saddle stitch the panels together, sand the edges, bevel them and burnish them until the piece finally settles into its finished form.

There is a directness to that process which I find incredibly satisfying. If something is wrong, you can see it. If something has been done well, you can see that too.

Running Emelgi alongside a full-time job has made me appreciate just how different passion looks when it has to fit around responsibility. There is a romantic idea of the side business where evenings are spent happily creating and weekends are full of quiet productivity, but the reality is less neat.

Some evenings I finish work mentally exhausted and have no desire to begin another shift. Some weekends are already full before I have even had the chance to think about leathercraft.

Orders need completing, stock needs replenishing, markets need preparing for, photographs need taking, videos need editing, packaging needs ordering, emails need replying to and the website always seems to need some kind of attention. The actual making, which is the part I love most, is only one element of running a small business.

That can create its own tension because the temptation is to make every free hour productive. When your craft is also your business, rest can easily start to feel like wasted time. An evening without making can feel like a missed opportunity to fulfil an order, develop a new product or prepare for the next market.

I have had to learn that this is not sustainable, and more importantly, that it risks changing the meaning of the craft itself. Something that began as an outlet can quickly become another source of pressure if every moment at the bench is measured against output.

Not every evening has to produce something sellable. Not every piece of leather needs to become stock. Not every idea needs to become a product. Sometimes it is enough simply to sit at the bench and make because I enjoy making.

That is perhaps the most important role leathercraft plays in my life. It gives me somewhere to slow down.

There is a point in the evening when I sit down at the workbench, put my phone away and everything becomes much smaller. The noise of the day fades into the background and my attention narrows to whatever is directly in front of me: a knife, a ruler, a piece of leather and a line that needs cutting.

It is difficult to explain why that feels so restorative unless you spend much of your life working at a screen. There is something grounding about doing work which requires your full attention but does not require you to be constantly connected.

A wandering blade can ruin a piece. A misplaced stitching hole cannot be deleted and retyped. Leather demands that you pay attention to what your hands are doing, and in doing so it pulls you back into the present moment.

The sounds and textures of the process have become part of that escape. The knife moving through leather, the hammer of a stitching punch, the hum of thread under tension being pulled through a stitching hole, the gradual smoothing of an edge under sandpaper - all small things, but together they create a kind of rhythm.

When I am working with my hands, I am not thinking about the next meeting, the next email or the next deadline. I am focused on the piece in front of me and, for a while, that is enough. Problems that felt enormous at five o’clock can feel surprisingly small after an hour spent quietly stitching.

I think that kind of outlet is important. Work can become such a large part of our identity that it is easy to forget there are parts of us which are not expressed through our professional lives.

Leathercraft gives me somewhere for those parts to exist. My day job exercises one side of my mind; craft exercises another.

Working with leather has also changed the way I think about perfection. Leather is a natural material and carries the evidence of the life it had before it reached my bench. There are scars, wrinkles, variations in grain and subtle differences in colour.

Two pieces cut from the same hide can behave differently. At first, there is a temptation to treat those differences as flaws, but over time you learn that they are part of what gives the material its character.

Handmade work is similar. The goal is not to imitate a machine. The small variations are evidence that a person was there: someone cut the leather, pulled the thread, shaped the edge and took the time to make the piece by hand.

That idea has gradually become connected to my faith too.

In Islam, there is the concept of ihsan. It is often translated as excellence, but I have always found that translation slightly incomplete. Ihsan is about doing something beautifully and sincerely, with an awareness that Allah sees what we do even when nobody else does.

That idea has begun to influence the way I approach craft.

Many of the details in a handmade wallet will never be noticed by the person who owns it. They may never know how carefully an internal pocket was skived before the piece was assembled. They may never know how many times an edge was sanded before it felt smooth. They may never know how carefully an edge is bevelled to give it gentle curve.

There are parts of the process that disappear entirely once the item is finished. It would be very easy to cut corners because it easy for someone to never know.

But I would know. God will know.

And, from the perspective of faith, that matters.

There is something powerful about trying to do work properly even when the effort will never be visible. The value is no longer only in whether somebody else notices the quality; it is also in the discipline of trying to work with sincerity.

It turns craft into something that is not simply about producing attractive objects, but about cultivating character: patience when a piece goes wrong, humility when an idea does not work, discipline when a repetitive task becomes boring, and care when nobody is watching.

These are small lessons, but perhaps most character is formed through small, repeated actions rather than dramatic moments of sheer will power. 

Leathercraft has therefore become more than a business for me. It is also a practice in slowing down and trying to be intentional.

That matters increasingly because so much of modern life seems designed around speed. Communication is faster, deliveries are faster, decisions are faster and there is a constant pressure to be doing more in less time.

Craft operates according to a different clock. Glue needs time to set. Edges need repeated sanding. Saddle stitching takes as long as saddle stitching takes. Vegetable-tanned leather develops its patina over years rather than minutes.

The material refuses to care about the urgency of my calendar. There is something reassuring about that. It is a reminder that not everything valuable needs to happen quickly and that some things are only improved through time, repetition and patience.

In many ways that philosophy sits at the heart of Emelgi. I have always wanted the things I make to feel considered rather than rushed, and to create objects that become better through use rather than disposable things designed to be replaced.

There are moments, of course, when I imagine what it would be like to leave the corporate world behind and spend every day making. No meetings and no inbox; just a workshop, a bench and enough orders to keep me there.

It is an appealing thought, particularly after a long week. But I have also started to recognise that the relationship between those two parts of my life is more complicated than one simply being an escape from the other.

My professional life makes me value the workshop, and the workshop makes me better able to return to my professional life.

One gives me intellectual challenge, structure, responsibility and the opportunity to contribute to work that affects people beyond myself. The other gives me creativity, physical work, independence and stillness.

They exercise different muscles and, at their best, they make each other more sustainable. I do not think balance necessarily means splitting your life perfectly between the things you care about. More often, it means understanding what each part of your life gives you and protecting enough space for the things that keep you grounded.

For me, that space is often found late in the evening after the working day is finished. I make my way to the bench and pick up whatever piece I left there the night before.

There may only be an hour available before I need to stop. Sometimes there is less. But for that hour, the world becomes quieter.