THE LONDON LAB
Champions of Detail
Inside ‘The Lab’, home to our small leather goods production in London’s crafty East End.
Factories normally conjure up Dickensian images of harsh red bricks and grey faces under grey skies packed into brutalist rooms, counting down to the next tea break. Not at Bennett Winch. Enter ‘The Lab’. Our ‘Small London Leathers’ factory, tucked behind a Hackney high street in East London, houses a tight group of some of the world’s most meticulous craftspeople. Centred around a single bench, a craft takes place here that relies on precision to the finest of margins, by those who favour the scalpel over the mallet..
Both our Carlisle and London factories work to exacting standards to create pieces that are complex in not only concept but execution; the difference is in the scale. In Carlisle, where we make our larger carries, we cut leather Suit Carrier Holdalls from a single seamless hide to approximately one metre by half-a-metre. Whereas in London, our small leather makers cut a panel for our Single Watch Roll down to four by six-and-a-half centimetres – and the manufacturing tolerances have to shrink accordingly.
‘Master craftspeople’ is a phrase that’s often misplaced – but our Hackney team are exactly that, able to create products from some of the most unforgiving materials that won’t succumb to repair if one single stitch goes awry. Champions of detail. Whether the world’s first flatbed watch roll, or our new, Alcantara-lined flight pouches, every Bennett Winch small leather good has made its way down that single, shared workbench, through minute processes and under the strictest of tolerances at the hands of the world’s craftiest, honorary, cockneys. Every product immaculate; they tolerate nothing less.