Why would I leave a future in finance to make leather bags? It started in Rome…

Bags can be found at: westendrd.com The Tribeca bag began years before WEST END RD existed. Its story started in Rome in the summer of 2023, when I was twenty years old and thought I understood clothes. Then I saw how people wore them: soft tailored jackets, scarves, suede loafers, everything relaxed and considered. I wanted to understand where that ease came from. In the first leather store I walked into, something stayed with me. Before I understood full-grain leather or vegetable tanning, I knew the smell and the feeling of the material in my hands. Long after I went home, I kept thinking about it. The following summer, I returned to Italy and took a train into the hills of Tuscany to meet the man who owned that store. In his workshop, he taught me how to cut leather, inspect a hide, and recognize the traces of the life it had carried. I asked if we could build something together. He gently said no. But I left with a prototype—the first Tribeca bag. For the next two years, that bag followed me through Korea, Japan, and New York. It began to show where I held it, what I carried, and which parts needed to be stronger. Meanwhile, I graduated, stepped away from a future in finance, and started making videos. Those videos eventually became Chasing Beauty. When I returned to the maker, I had something to show him: a community that cared about the craft and beauty I had been trying to put into words. This time, he said yes. We spent six months refining the bag, folding the top edge, stitching down the handles, and reinforcing the places my prototype had worn. Years of carrying it became part of its construction. The Tribeca is a bag made by hand in Italy, shaped by everyday use and a feeling I couldn’t leave behind.