Handstitched leather goods and workshops, made and hosted in Brixton, London.
ATHÉALIER exists to make fewer things, better.
Why ATHÉALIER exists
Most things today are made to be replaced. Fast production, disposable design, cheap materials to maximise profit margins. ATHÉALIER exists as a quiet rebellion against this, making a small number of things slowly and with care. ATHÉALIER products are built to age and grow more beautiful as they do, resistant to the carousel of fashion trends.
ATHÉALIER is rooted in something beyond the end product: the purposeful and often meditative act of leathercraft. It's something I believe more people deserve to experience. My workshop evenings exist to open up this experience to anyone curious enough to try. To offer a space to slow down, learn something new, and make something with your own hands that holds a different meaning to anything you could buy.
Where it came from
I grew up in rural southern Spain, where a family friend (a professional leather craftsman) handed down the basics of leather work when I was young. I didn't know then how much that would stay with me.
Twenty years later, living a fairly hectic life in London, I found myself coming back to it. Initially as a hobby, making things for friends and family, witnessing my own skills slowly improve, finding something genuinely absorbing in the process. The feedback I got, and the commissions that followed, made me realise there was something in it beyond my own enjoyment: a real appetite for things made slowly and with intention. Objects with a story behind them, made by someone you can actually talk to.
ATHÉALIER grew from that. The name joins atelier - a place of quiet, considered making - with my own name, Théa.
What we do
ATHÉALIER offers a small collection of handstitched goods from my Brixton studio. Everything is designed in-house, cut and stitched by hand, and made to order. My products have been developed thoughtfully and refined through use; nothing is released until it has been tested and lived with. I make things how I'd want to buy them. I also take on bespoke commissions for those after something particular.
For those who want to try it themselves, I host intimate leathercraft evenings, with drinks and nibbles provided. A few hours of learning and creating, guided but unhurried, hopefully good fun, and you take your own hand made leather product home with you.
My products and workshops alike use the same full-grain, vegetable-tanned hides sourced from the finest British and European tanneries.
Materials and environmental impact
All leather at ATHÉALIER is full-grain and vegetable-tanned, sourced from A&A Crack & Sons, a UK supplier with nearly 40 years of relationships with some of the UK and Europe's finest tanneries. I work primarily with Badalassi Carlo Pueblo leather: naturally marked, beautifully textured, and renowned for the rich patina it develops over years of use. It's also the leather I use in workshops, so whether you're buying or making, you're working with the same top quality hides.
I don't use the word “sustainable” to sell my leathercraft. It's overused, often poorly understood, and in the context of leather, genuinely complicated as it’s inextricably linked to a meat industry that should be a fraction of its current size in a truly sustainable world. What I try to do instead is engage with and understand the impacts of the materials I use and products I make, and be straight with you about it. It's an area filled with controversy as well as nuance, so requires peeling back the polarised opinions to try and assess the unbiased evidence (and yes, I am a leathercrafter, but I genuinely care about this so have tried to be as objective as possible). So buckle up if you really want to delve into the detail below!
------------------------------------------------
[References are shown like this and listed below]
Two of the best sources I came across with robust and scientific evidence to help me work out the environmental impacts of leather were a Springer Nature 2025 meta analysis from 56 Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) studies [1] and a blog from Laurent Vandepaer PhD at Carbon Fact [2]. Life Cycle Assessment or LCA is scientific standard (ISO 14040/44) for evaluating environmental impacts. A Life Cycle Assessment considers the Global Warming Potential (what we’d often hear called the carbon footprint) as well as other impacts such as Eutrophication and Water use.
Many people [3, 4, 5] try and claim that leather is a by-product of the meat and dairy industry because almost all cow hides come from cows slaughtered for their meat. Others (who I’m inclined to agree with to at least some extent) argue that leather is a co-product, not a by-product, as the hide itself has value and therefore plays some role in the economics of cattle farming. More specifically though, a raw cow hide represents somewhere between 1.5% and 3.5% of the market value of a slaughtered animal. This sounds small given how expensive full-grain leather is, but most of what you're paying for in high quality leather is the tanning process itself, particularly vegetable tanning, which uses plant-based tannins and oils rather than heavy metals used in chrome tanning. Currently, around 40% of hides from the meat industry are not processed into leather and actually go to waste or landfill.
So it seems reasonable to say that leather, as a secondary good, represents a small but still existent share of the economic value of the meat and dairy industry, and therefore of its ethical and carbon costs.
If we look at the Global Warming Potential (GWP), the cattle farming accounts for roughly 65% of leather's total footprint, making it the single biggest variable of its impact. The remainder of leather’s GWP is due to the subsequent processing, such as tanning. This meta analysis calculated the total GWP of one square metre of cow leather at 17–20 kg CO₂ eq.
To translate this all into something real: if we factor in road freight transport, a leather belt is estimated to carry a lifecycle footprint of roughly 1.5 kg CO₂ eq., comparable to a small beef burger, a five-mile drive in a petrol car, 15-minutes worth of hot shower, or an hour or two of heating a London flat in winter.
What about leather alternatives?
The argument of natural leather vs alternatives to leather is also charged to say the least! So what are the facts? An academic study from KTH Royal Institute of Technology compared Life Cycle Assessments of Bovine, Polyurethane and Mycelium Leather. Vegan/synthetic/faux leathers today are mainly Polyurethane (PU) leather that use non-renewable raw materials (such as plastic made from fossil fuels) and an energy intensive manufacturing process. Nevertheless the Global Warming Potential (GWP) of PU leather is approximately half that of cow leather. However, if we consider the lifespan and durability of the products made from leathers, PU leather products do well to survive 2-3 years whereas full grain leather endures 20+ years of use, so leather's environment impact is typically spread over many more years and uses. Mycelium leather may be a top contender to natural leather over the next few years as its development improves. It’s GWP can be 3-4X lower than PU leather which makes it by far the most sustainable ‘leather-like’ material, yet it could boast a lifespan of up to 4-6 years. Let’s watch this space, I’d certainly consider switching when there’s a truly viable alternative.
References
1. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s43621-025-00798-6
2. https://www.carbonfact.com/blog/knowledge/leather-carbon-impact
3. https://www.aplf.com/2024/01/03/unveiling-the-truth-leathers-environmental-impact/
4. https://www.leathernaturally.org/
5. https://www.leatherworkinggroup.com/
6. https://kth.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1886097/FULLTEXT01.pdf
