Searching for a leather jacket in Canada? You might want to check out this brand
The very core of the Canadian brand
can be distilled down to one ambition.
“We exist to reinvent the iconic leather jacket,” Rosa Halpern, owner and designer behind the Toronto-based company, says simply.
The fashion creative founded the company after a friend asked Halpern to make her a custom leather jacket. A professional athlete with a muscular-yet-petite frame, the pal complained that she couldn’t find a topper that fit her properly.
“I had a background in design, and I was kind of doing an in-between job as a buyer, so I made her a leather jacket,” Halpern recalls of the custom-fit piece she crafted at the time.
The jacket turned out to be so good that five more friends signed on for a creation.
“We started building custom jackets, one jacket at a time,” she recalls. “And, from there, the brand really blossomed. And before I knew it, I had this wait list of people, this idea for our business, and here we are.”
Since its start in 2016, Halpern has worked to push the brand into the forefront of custom leather fashion design.
“At the time, there was no one else doing what we were doing. I had sort of fallen into this niche world,” she recalls.
In addition to being a pretty badass piece in a wardrobe, Halpern points to the permanence that a good leather jacket can hold in one’s closet as a particular point of pride associated with the style.
“These are not fast-fashion items that you are going to replace season after season,” she says of the leather pieces she designs. “It’s going to be a forever piece that you can hand down to your child, or even your grandchild. Because a good leather jacket is not going anywhere.”
Focusing firmly on custom, made-to-measure leather jackets for the first few years of business, Halpern has since built out the brand to include other designs such as skirts, pants and ready-to-wear leather outerwear styles that aren’t custom-created. Offering garments sized 00 to 24, Halpern says bespoke, custom pieces are still a primary pillar of the brand.
The designs in the By the Namesake collection are named after people Halpern feels have helped to change the world. It’s a point of inspiration, she says, that touches on the unique power that a perfectly fitting garment — especially a leather piece — can have on a wearer.
“When you put on a leather jacket, especially one that is made for you and that fits you perfectly, it does have this amazing, transformative ability to change the way you feel about yourself — whether it makes you feel a little bit stronger, a little bit braver, whatever it is that you need,” she says. “It really allows you to take on this persona.”
One thing that’s remained the same throughout the nearly 10 years in business is Halpern’s commitment to creating her pieces in Canada.
“We own our own production,” Halpern says of the vertically integrated business model.
Rather than holding large amounts of manufactured stock, By the Namesake keeps raw material on-hand to make both ready-to-wear and made-to-measure pieces on demand.
Owning and operating its own manufacturing at its Toronto studio allows the team to respond quicker to an order request — while also affording the opportunity to create some really unique pieces.
“If you’re going full-custom and you wanted a lime green leather jacket, we don’t keep lime green lambskin in our studio because that’s very, very unusual,” says Halpern. “Instead, we would have to order that leather specific to you, and therefore the lead time is longer than with our ready-to-wear.”
Opting to keep rolls of leather on-hand rather than garments that would have to be discounted latter on is a commitment to sustainability, she says. And a more sensible fashion cycle than one built squarely around trends.
“We know that leather itself, in a raw form, doesn’t go bad. So we can have that leather, and we will use that leather,” Halpern explains.
To help balance the seasonality of the skins, By the Namesake introduced unlined leather jackets this year to provide a lighter-weight alternative for its customers. The brand also launched select silk designs for the height of summer and some homeware goods such as coasters made from leather dead-stock and candles in recent seasons.
“We’re coming up with a product offering that is evergreen, not seasonal,” she says.
Last year, the company furthered its commitment to Canadian manufacturing by introducing a new leather into its line. Sourced from Alberta, the full-grain cow leather — dubbed Rocky leather — represented a way to shorten the company’s production cycle, while making some designs more affordable for shoppers by nixing the need to bring in leather from Europe.
When the tariffs came in earlier this year, the Canadian material incorporation appeared all the more prescient.
“Thank goodness we have that in place, because we have that to fall back on while we navigate the kind of rockier, no pun intended, more unstable supply chain,” Halpern says.
Whether from Canada or Europe, Halpern says all the leathers used are a byproduct of the food industry.
“So, we don’t work with any exotic leathers. That’s really important to us,” she notes.
Having navigated COVID-19 as a fairly new brand — the current By the Namesake studio and production hub opened in March 2020 — and now facing tariff turmoil amid the continuing trade war with the U.S., Halpern is confident that, if she sticks to her principles, she’ll see her company through the “crazy hurdles” being thrown at businesses these days.
“It’s not easy, and it definitely takes risk. But I do believe in what we’re building,” she says. “I believe in the clothing that we’re building, in its ability to make someone feel like the best version of themselves. And in its ability to be this really special wardrobe piece that lasts forever.”
Related
Source: vancouversun.com