Origins & Craft

The origin is the signature.

Four things decide what a MBALI piece is: where the hide came from, how it was tanned, who made it, and what is written in the register afterwards. Each is documented before a piece leaves the bench.

The materials
Nine hides, each chosen for a grain and a weight that suits one kind of piece.
The nine hides
The sourcing charter
How a hide reaches us, and the conditions we hold ourselves to.
Read the charter
The atelier
One maker per piece, and the register they sign at the end of it.
Visit the atelier

Our standards

One hide, one register

Every hide enters the register with its region, its date and the name of the tannery that worked it. That number is struck into the seal on your piece and printed on its certificate.

Wild, never farmed

Nothing we use is bought at auction or drawn from an anonymous supply chain. Every hide comes through a licensed conservation programme on land we work with directly, following the management plan its own wildlife managers have set. No animal is caged, farmed, or taken for its skin alone.

Every meal is given onward

MBALI carries the cost of each day in the field and asks for nothing back but the hide. The meat is donated to children's homes and to communities near that land, through the landholder's own distribution. The leather is what would otherwise have been left behind.

Two tanneries

We work with two tanneries, both chosen for pit tanning with acacia and mimosa bark rather than chrome. It is slower, and it ages to a depth chrome does not reach. We do not move a hide elsewhere to save time.

Under our own hand, end to end

From the land to the bench, no part of the process is contracted out to someone we cannot name. MBALI is present on the land, at the tannery and at the cutting table, and the same register follows the hide through all three.

Made where it grew

Cut, stitched and finished in our Cape Town atelier, so the value stays on the continent the hide came from.

The Mbali Seal

Every piece carries one mark. The seal is sand-cast in solid brass with a 24-carat gold-plated finish, so it holds the softened edges and fine surface grain that only a casting gives. Within a plain polished rim, the Mbali flower is cut clean through the metal — seven leaves and a raised bud, with open voids between each one. Those gaps are not ornament: they let the seal lie flat, saddle-stitched into a hand-cut recess in the leather.

All MBALI hardware — seals, chains, rings, buckles and feet — is solid-brass hardware with a 24-carat gold-plated finish. No component is solid gold.

Authenticated by the seal

The seal is also the record. Each one is struck on the reverse with the piece serial, which is linked to the Hide Origin ID of the material it was cut from. Both numbers appear on your certificate and are held in the MBALI Origin Register in Cape Town. Send us the serial, or a photograph of the reverse of your seal, and we will confirm the hide origin, the tannery, the maker and the date the piece left the bench.