Both sold before noon, and I had not expected that at all.
Quasar Leather started in 2014 on a rented bench in a shared workshop on Tanner Street in Bermondsey, south London. Dominic Farrell had just come back from two years in Florence, where he had been cutting bridle leather at a small atelier run by Gianluca Mori. The Florence work was almost entirely equestrian: saddle panels, girth straps, stirrup leathers. Coming back to London, he wanted to make things people would carry every day, not just ride with. The first pieces were a bifold wallet and a watch strap. He sold them through a small table at a Bermondsey market stall in November 2014. Both sold before noon.
The turning point came in the winter of 2016, when a buyer for a small independent shop in Marylebone asked if Quasar could supply six card sleeves for the Christmas floor. Dominic said yes, cut them over a weekend, and delivered them on a Tuesday. The shop sold all six by Thursday and called back for eight more. That order forced him to think seriously about consistency: same hide weight, same thread tension, same edge finish across every piece. He started keeping a cutting log that winter, noting the hide batch number, the ambient humidity in the workshop, and the thread lot for every piece. He still keeps it, now in its fourth notebook.
The studio moved to its current space on Bermondsey Street in early 2019, a ground-floor room with a north-facing window and enough bench space for two people. Dominic works with one part-time assistant, Priya Nair, who joined in 2022 and handles finishing and dispatch. The range has grown slowly and deliberately: bags were added in 2020, belts in 2021, and a small repair service in 2023 after enough people started bringing in pieces from other makers. The studio does not do wholesale. It does not do drop-shipping. Everything ships from the bench it was made on.
Dominic Farrell trained as a saddler at the Cordwainers programme at London College of Fashion between 2009 and 2012, where he worked alongside instr…