Our Story

A workshop story, in six parts

A supply room built by people who still have leather dust under their fingernails.

The spark

Before ILS, there was a holster

Some stories start with a business plan. Ours started with a wedding, or rather, with more than seventy of them.

In 2015, Animesh was an IT engineer by day and a wedding photographer by night. Over the next three years he shot more than seventy weddings across the country, enough travel to circle the globe three times. Somewhere in that blur, he wanted a camera harness built like a gun holster: quick to draw from, tough enough to survive an eight-hour wedding, good-looking enough to wear like it belonged. Nothing like it existed in India, so he cut, punched, and riveted his own.

He wore it on a shoot in the desert sands of Rajasthan later that year. A Lebanese tourist noticed it, asked about it, and bought it off his shoulders on the spot: the first harness we ever sold.

That first harness sold before it was ever meant to. What came after was different. Animesh spent the next year quietly testing, refining, and rebuilding it, refusing to sell another until it had earned the right to be sold. That became the rule ever since, at ARLW and later at ILS: nothing goes up for sale until it has survived a year of us trying to break it. In 2016, the harness, rebuilt more times than he could count, became a business: ARLW Gear.

The Craftsman, ARLW's first camera harness, 2015

The leap

The other founder

Deepa had a career of her own, at a multinational IT company, the same world Animesh had already left behind by the time ARLW existed. For its first couple of years, ARLW was his to run alone: the making, the shipping, the customers, all of it.

By 2019, running ARLW alone had stopped being sustainable. Orders were piling up faster than one person could make them, ship them, and answer for them, and every day started before it should have, with a queue of overnight messages from customers on the other side of the world waiting before anything else could get done. Something had to give, and it wasn't going to be the business. Deepa gave up the career she'd spent years building and came in full-time. From that point on, this has never been a one-person business. It's been the two of them, on the bench, in the inbox, and on the road, ever since.

Animesh replying to overseas customer messages early in the morning

The grind

A decade at the bench

For the years that followed, ARLW made camera straps, belts, wallets, and portfolios, every single piece cut, riveted, and finished by two pairs of hands. No factory line, no outsourcing. Just two makers who refused to stop working the leather themselves.

That first harness alone multiplied into thousands sold across five continents, from Los Angeles to London to Sydney and everywhere in between. ARLW's goods reached wardrobes in several countries and crossed multi-crore revenue over the run, built one hide, one rivet at a time. More than a decade at the bench teaches you things no course ever could.

The reckoning

Lessons we paid for

Not every hard lesson came from customs or logistics. In 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, a hardware vendor started supplying parts that looked fine on the shelf and failed within months after dispatch, buckles that snapped, hooks that seized. It cost us lakhs, and something harder to rebuild: trust. We ended up shipping replacements to customers across three continents out of our own pocket, just to protect a reputation we'd spent years building. The vendor shrugged and took no responsibility.

In October 2021, a FedEx shipment of hardware sat stuck for over two months, right through our busiest Christmas season, and cost us lakhs more.

And it isn't only hardware. We've watched it happen to other makers more times than we can count: vegetable-tanned leather quietly swapped for chrome tan, goat sold as calfskin, and "Italian leather" that never left India. It's the kind of deception that's nearly impossible to catch until the product is already in a customer's hands, and it's enough to kill a brand, and a maker's motivation, in a single order.

You either gambled on a vendor and hoped, or paid a premium and a customs headache to import quality from abroad. There was no middle path.

That gap is the entire reason ILS exists

The answer

So we built the shop we wished we'd had

By 2022, we were done waiting for someone else to build that middle path. India Leather Supply started as the answer to our own supply chain: tools we'd tested ourselves, hardware we'd trust with our own orders, hides that are what they claim to be. First for us. Then for the maker down the road. Then for hundreds of you, across India. No pitch deck, no funding round, just two makers tired of settling.

The promise

Built by people who use what they sell

We're not a warehouse that decided to sell leather goods. We're leatherworkers who happened to build one. Every tool on this site has passed through our own hands, on our own projects, first. If a knife won't hold its edge, or a brass rivet turns out to be an iron rivet with a colour plating on top, we already know. We've run into it ourselves.

What we hold to

We test what we stock

On our own bench, before it reaches yours.

Honest grading, honest pricing

No dressing up a Grade B hide as A.

A real person answers

Not a script. Email, phone, or WhatsApp.

Always adding, never diluting

We grow the catalogue on your feedback.

From a first wallet stitched at the kitchen table, to saddlers and bag makers running full workshops, you're the reason we sweat the details most people would skip.

Come craft with us.

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