Meet the artisan
Shanti Ganesha
Founder and maker behind the leatherworks brand @curame.leathergoods
Shanti Ganesha founded Curame – her artisanal leatherworks brand – in 2020, after graduating from the Art School of Venice and years of traveling in the search of cultures and materials for crafting.
Curame revisits the classic in a modern, elegant and minimalist way.
Let’s have a chat with her 💬☕️
Hi Shanti, thanks for the interview. Please introduce yourself to the TA-DAAN Community and tell us how you got into leather goods.
Hello, thank you for this opportunity. I became interested in leather more or less in 2013 after returning from a trip to India where I had participated in a pottery class and then one on bamboo working. At that time, post high school, I was intoxicated with the desire to experiment with materials and crafts.
Coming out of a more artistic path, studying painting arts, I didn’t find full gratification in figurative art, I felt the need for something closer to me, that represented me in all senses and this was in practicality, art disguised as a useful object. When I touched leather for the first time and made my first artifact, I knew I had found my medium, it was love at first touch.
Your travels have certainly nourished your work with inspiration. What places have you visited and which ones have influenced your style and your leather creations more than others?
Travel has been an important step in my training as a person and as an artisan, each place has taught me something new in its own way , not only about the world, its cultures and arts, but above all about myself as traveling means undertaking a path within oneself.
I lived 1 year in New Zealand, 2 in Australia, 1 in England and Scotland, I traveled to Burma, Thailand and Indonesia and well India where I grew up and where I return periodically.
Along the way I met artisans who taught me to carve leather, weave it and explore knots, I could explore shapes, designs, techniques that each culture has to offer.
“Travel has been an important step in my training as a person and as an artisan, each place has taught me something new in its own way.“
Shanti Ganesha – Curame founder
Leather is a material that can be discussed a lot in terms of sustainability. What do you think? How do you choose the skin for Curame?
I pay a lot of attention to sustainability, although many people do not totally agree, I find leather to be a very sustainable material and now I’ll explain why:
- Leather is a waste product of the food system (by-product), so we take waste and transform it;
- I strictly select vegetable tanning, that is, tanned with organic material such as tree bark and plants, therefore vegetable tanning comes from nature and returns to nature;
- The leather I select is certified by the consortium “genuine Italian vegetable tanned leather” located in Tuscany and where the sustainability of the industry is guaranteed by recycling waste and purifying waste water;
- Leather lasts an eternity ( great cost-per-wear)! When you buy a well manufactured leather product it will last you decades and will acquire beauty over time.
I bet you have an old leather bag of your mother, or a worn belt of your grandmother that tells a great story: that is the magic of long lasting leather! 🤩
Tell us about your best seller! Tell us what makes it special.
My best seller is the simple and elegant mouse pad, but also the sling bag, which is also my favorite to be honest.
It is much appreciated for its unique and original design, it draws inspiration from the shapes of nature such as a cocoon or a crumpled leaf, it is certainly a bag that stands out, and is very roomy and practical.
Suitable for those who dare to go out of the box a little.
We find the strictly manual approach you take to be fascinating. In particular the seams: how do you make them? How long does it take to make a product like the Sling Bag?
Yes, the process is strictly manual, in fact, in my studio I only have a tool that works with electricity: the heat printer for impressing the brand!
All the rest works all with elbow grease: from drilling to cutting every step of the process passes through my fingers, but above all the meticulously hand-made stitching, using the saddle-maker technique, an ancient method that weaves a single double-needle twine.
The substantial difference between a machine stitching and a hand stitching is that manual stitching is stronger and more durable if you break the up on one point of the bag, with the machine stitching you unravel the whole bag while with the manual one you lose only one point, and it is easier to repair as well.
One of the challenges of hand sewing is that it takes a significant amount of time (more or less 8h to make the sling bag and other bags take me up to 14h in manufacturing).
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