A Custom Leather Goods Order Tracker That Works as Hard as Our Leather Crafters

The Problem With Most Custom Orders

Amazon has set a cultural standard of instant gratification when it comes to ordering goods to our homes- this implicitly makes customers misunderstand our handmade leather goods lead times that typically run 10-12 weeks. Customers click “order” and after a couple of weeks the anxiety kicks in: where is my order, is this a scam? We get it, you work hard for your money and you don’t want to feel like you’re sending it off into the void.

We asked ourselves: the lead times are posted top and center on our website banner, and on every product page- what else can we do to communicate the time it takes to hand craft leather goods and reframe the wait for the customer as a good thing?

The Solution

The inspiration for the solution came from Domino’s Pizza. Imagine: it’s a random Thursday after a long day of work and school and the family has already eaten all the groceries in the house but they’re hungry NOW. You get on the Dominos app and order dinner. When the kids ask where the pizza’s at- you can show them exactly, as Dominos tracks the pizza from baking to delivery all the way to your door.  With their pizza tracker, Dominos is giving you peace of mind. It tells you what Dominos may be dealing with behind the scenes- a high volume of orders ahead of yours, traffic on the route to your door, and gives you an exact estimate to relay to your family on when their hunger will be satiated. This information doesn’t make the family less hungry, but it does help reduce their demand for instant gratification. We can all agree we don’t want our pizza faster if it means it skips the baking phase, and we can all agree the technology does not yet exist to have drone delivery bypassing traffic.

Our order tracker aims to give you the same peace of mind. We know you’re hungry for your new leather goods, and we want to show you exactly what goes into getting them to you before we can satiate that appetite our business deeply appreciates and thrives on.

How the Production Order Tracker Actually Works

Every step of the process corresponds to an email that will land in your inbox. The steps are as follows:

1. Order Received for a Custom Leather Radio Strap or Belt

This email confirms your order went through and you’re officially in our production queue. Success, you’re in.

2. Check in at Week 4

This email confirms that your order did not go into the void, but you are in fact moving up in the production line. It gives you the confidence that our small business of 11 employees is busting tail to fill the orders ahead of yours.

3. The Order is in Progress

This is where your order becomes tangible. It’s at the front of the line and officially going into production.  

4. The Custom Leather Radio Strap or Belt is Cut by Hand

This is where the side of leather meets the blade and is cut down into the shape of your new gear.

5. Stitching Full-Grain Leather Goods

Once the leather is the right shape, it gets sewn together on our sewing machine specifically designed to handle leather.

6. Edge Finishing, Custom Leather Stamping, and Hand-Painted Detail

In this step, the edges of your product are beveled, burnished, and sealed for a slick look that stands up to everyday use. From there the customization comes in: we stamp and paint your chosen names and images into your gear.

7. Quality Control on Handmade Leather Gear

Handmade work comes with human error. Quality control catches this: maybe the shop cat jumped on the drying paint table. Quality control sees that paw print before the product hits the shipping room and sends the strap back to the paint table.

8. Shipping confirmation

It’s almost there. Your shipping label has been printed and you can track your new gear from our workshop in Waynesville, NC to wherever you are in the world.  

---

Behind the Scenes Videos: Watch Your Custom Fire Service Leather Gear Being Made

This order tracking concept was originally designed for our staple fire service gear item: the radio strap. We make roughly one batch of these a week, each batch containing 50-75 radio straps.  At the end of the work day the leather crafters are responsible for moving their day’s work into the proper phase of production via our internal tracking application so the application sends the corresponding customers order update emails.

Meet the Leather Crafters Making Your Custom Leather Gear

When the customer gets their update email, they can watch videos of the stage of production their leather goods are in. They’ll see the leather delivery come in from Wickett and Craig, watch Dan choose the correct leather for their order from our stock, see Spencer cut the leather down, Courtney sew in the lining, Travis stamp names onto straps, Natalie paint the names to their specifications, and finally they’ll watch Courtney inspect the leather goods before they get sent to the shipping room for fulfillment.

Each email is signed off by our shop lead, Travis, who oversees production. The goal is for the customer to see all the hands that go into the craftsmanship that sets Axe and Awl goods apart and understand that crafting custom leather goods is a specialty practice we’ve fine-tuned over the past 11 years in business. Rome wasn’t built in a day.

Why This isn’t Just a Shipping Notification

We want to build positive relationships with our customers for years to come. Silence in the 10-12 weeks between the moment of ordering and the moment of delivery creates doubt and mistrust and results in a ton of frustrated phone calls for our customer experience coordinator, Lindsey, to field. We get that our customers have too much going on in their heads to know exactly where they’re at in their wait, our order tracker will give them the confidence that they can trust us to get it right.

In the meantime, the customer will get to know the shop, see the leather crafters work through the process, and develop a deeper appreciation of what goes into hand crafting leather goods built to take the heat and look good doing it.  

The Wait is the Work

The volume of orders we receive despite the 10-12 week wait is proof of the quality we deliver. You can order something cheap over and over and appease that need for instant gratification, or order a hand crafted product from us once and get lifelong gratification. Get it right the first time, good work takes as long as it takes. You don’t rush a knot you’re going to trust your life to.

See What Goes into Your Custom Leather Gear

Get in our order queue yourself by placing an order for a custom radio strap or belt and watch the leather crafting process for yourself. By the time your new leather gear is in your hands, you’ll want to shake Travis’ hand.