Ben Schreiber is Chief Marketing Officer at Latico Leathers, where he has worked since 2020. Latico has been family run from New Jersey since 1984, making full-grain leather bags in small batches.

What he writes about here

Two things: how to choose a bag, and how to look after it once you have one.

• Choosing between shapes: sling, crossbody, tote, shoulder and hobo, and which suits which kind of day
• Sizing, strap drop and what an empty bag weighs before anything goes in it
• Cost per wear rather than sticker price
• Leather care: stains, marks, cleaning and conditioning on uncoated full-grain
• Which trends have wardrobe history behind them and which are a single season

Pieces on design, craft and how a bag is constructed are written by Lainie Schreiber, Latico's Creative Director.

Leather care guides

• Ultimate Guide to Leather ConditionerWhen full-grain actually needs conditioning, how often, and why most bags need it far less than the internet suggests.
• How to Get Oil Stains Out of LeatherWhy cornstarch beats chemistry, and why most ruined bags were ruined by the second attempt rather than the spill.
• How to Remove Ink From LeatherInk is a dye and your bag is dyed. What that means for every solvent people recommend.
• How to Soften Leather SafelyWhy stiffness in new full-grain is a stage rather than a fault, and which softening methods do lasting damage.
• How to Remove Gum From LeatherCold, then lift, never scrape. One of the few leather problems with a genuinely reliable fix.

How the care guidance is verified

Leather advice online is mostly repeated rather than checked, and a lot of it is written for coated leather then applied to uncoated hides, where it does real damage. So the care guidance on this site is not assembled from other articles.

In September 2026 we put a written list of questions to the tannery that makes our leather and asked them to confirm or correct each one: rubbing alcohol, hairspray, petroleum jelly, coconut and olive and jojoba and avocado oil, linseed oil, white vinegar, baking soda, mink oil, direct heat, and whether leaving leather in the sun opens its pores. Their written answers are what these guides now reflect.

Several of those answers corrected what this site previously said, and those pages were rewritten rather than quietly left up. Where a claim has not been confirmed, the guides say it is our recommended approach rather than presenting it as established fact.

How the buying guides are written

Every measurement, price and certification stated in a Latico guide is checked against the live product catalogue before publication rather than carried forward from an older draft. Where a claim cannot be verified, it is removed rather than softened. That includes counts: if a guide does not tell you how many styles are in a collection, it is because the number changes and a wrong number is worse than none.

Latico Leathers, New Jersey. Full-grain leather, handcrafted in small batches, LWG and REACH certified. Latico does not offer cleaning, re-dyeing or repair services, so where a guide recommends seeing a professional, that recommendation is independent.