Thank you for joining The Masses! I am Patrick Magee-Jenks, a full-time high school teacher, and the founder and craftsman behind The Masses Brand.

The Masses Brand specializes in handmade leather artifacts for creative and curious humans, their homes, and their pets. The brand was established in 2018 to provide beautiful, high-quality, hand-crafted everyday items for all, and to close the massive (and ever widening) gap between consumer and craftsman. We long for an age when people knew the hands behind their artifacts. When products were made custom for individual needs, tastes, styles and sizes, by people who studied their craft and took pride in their work. When items were made to last and look good for decades, instead of days, and when profits put food on the tables of artisans, instead of executives.

There’s something special about being able to look the very person in the eye who created an investment-caliber item that will see daily use, for years and years to come. There’s also something special about being able to look someone in the eye, as they take loving possession of that thing you made with your own hands, knowing that your reputation and pride rest in their satisfaction. While it may be the way of things that there is rarely a cobbler down the road that has your shoe lasts on her shelves, The Masses Brand seeks to use the connective aspects of the internet to rekindle some of degree of that maker/user relationship.

I have been a tinkerer and maker of things for as long as I could remember. My introduction to leathersmithing evolved out of a deep DIY mentality, and a fascination with design. No amount of window shopping would ever yield fruitful manifestations of the goods I would imagine, so I began to fashion my own equipment, at first, for bushcraft, and later, for fashion and functionality. I now am delighted to share those visions with you, The Masses—by putting you, the cherished patron of my craft at the forefront of people-first designs that are as utilitarian as they are luxuriously tactile. And since this creative passion exists within a maison of my own construction, without laborers or entrepreneurs or shareholders, I can set fair prices for investment-level goods that are accessible to discerning end users.

In a commitment to environmental sustainability and uncompromising quality, I source all leather materials from the most highly regarded tanneries on earth. These happen to be located in Chicago, Ill., Italy and France, and who each have set industry standards of sustainability. All bovine hides are the would-be wasted byproducts of domestic food production. While other leather shops might cheap out on their materials, the best hides come from cattle that are left to roam ranch lands free of barbed wire and feedlots.

This is the way The Masses works. The things we use, the things we make, really do matter. Just as the people who use them, and the people who make them matter too.