The Workshop

You all have memories like that. A place, a light, a smell, and you don't really know why it stayed. Not the big occasions. The small moments.

There was an instrument repair shop two streets from where I grew up. The man who ran it had been gone for a long time. He repaired violins mostly, and anything else with strings and a soundboard. What I remember is the sawdust in the doorway, the tools laid out in the same order every morning, and his hands.

He never knew I would exist. And yet, something had passed through time. The idea that what you make can outlive you.

Not far from there, there was a tailor behind his counter. The same concentration. The same quiet certainty that what he was doing that day, he would still be doing exactly the same way ten years later.

I grew up between countries, between cultures: Beirut, Marseille, Dubai, Paris, Milan. That kind of life does not give you fixed roots. But it teaches you to look.

I carried that way of looking with me everywhere. Into automotive studios, where I modelled concept cars. Into the Alps, where I co-founded a design studio. Then into leather workshops: the smell of raw hide, tools placed in the same order they had always been, a maker cutting a piece without even looking at the ruler.

Those places have a particular quality. The sound is different there. So is time. That is where I found words for what the repair shop had shown me without ever knowing it.

When I was taken on at a maison in Paris, I understood that it was time. Not to enter someone else's house, but to build my own.

Veloro had already existed since 2010, as a side project, stitched from leather offcuts recovered from those workshops. The first wallets were made at night, just to see. I decided to take it seriously.

From Dubai, that idea found a place.

The Veloro workshop was born from that need to stay close to the things we make: to see the material, feel its resistance, draw a line, cut, assemble, stitch, finish. Not to separate the drawing from the gesture. Not to imagine an object far away from the way it will actually be made.

Here, each piece is made from full-grain vegetable-tanned leather, selected hide by hide. It is saddle stitched by hand with two needles and waxed linen thread, then finished by hand down to the edges.

Slow gestures, lasting materials, nothing that cannot be seen or touched.

What interests me is making objects that age well. Objects that develop a patina instead of wearing out, that carry the trace of the person who uses them. The opposite of something disposable. Something you could pass on to your children — not because you should, but because it is still there, still beautiful, still useful.

We spend years somewhere, and what we remember are often details. A face, a smell, the light of a precise afternoon. Things that could have gone unnoticed, but somehow anchored themselves and never left.

If one of these objects becomes one of those memories someday, I will have done what I hoped to do.

Muhammad Benyameen