Airbnb × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.
An August study.
Airbnb began in 2007 with a sold-out design conference in San Francisco and two hosts who inflated three airbeds for people they had never met. The company still opens its story there, and likes how it ends: the first guests arrived as strangers and left as friends. Nearly twenty years later it describes a community built on "connection and belonging," and its mark says home in almost every country on earth.
Anastassia Babanskaia produces product and brand experiences there, and describes her work as bringing to life "products and experiences that touch humans in a meaningful way." We read that line and recognized our own trade, so this study is for her desk: a set of dies for the people who turn an address into an arrival.
The mark, as found
The Bélo of 2014, one continuous loop that reads as a letter A and a location pin with a heart hiding inside, beside the lowercase wordmark – exactly as Airbnb publishes it.
Pressed
The lockup is wide, so the tags run lengthwise and the press rides the long axis. Poppy red carries the warm side of their signature pink, and gray sand answers the pale, quiet gray of their interfaces. The black tag takes the gold.
The arrival key
Hosting begins the moment a key changes hands. So the keychain die is a key whose bow is a small house, its round window doubling as the grip – the key under the mat, made ceremonial. Gold on the black fob, a nod to the golden keys of old hotel doors, and blind deboss on poppy red.
Arrived as strangers
The founding sentence deserves to hang somewhere a traveler will see it every morning. The roundel sets an open door and a doormat between two arcs of text, ARRIVED AS STRANGERS above and LEFT AS FRIENDS below, and sits as a maker's mark in the corner of a country gray and dark espresso stack. Blind deboss only – a washbag has no business shining.
The welcome stamp
A passport collects stamps from borders; we wanted it to carry one issued by a house. A visa-style frame with WELCOME across the top and YOU BELONG HERE beneath an open door. It went on fuchsia, the nearest leather we have to their pink, and on black, where the unfoiled press reads as a quiet shadow relief.
Where the keys land
Every arrival actually ends at the tray by the door. Its medallion is a compass rose built of keys – eight of them, bits turned inward toward one small house, so the real keys dropped there each evening rest on a bed of pressed ones. The tray comes in golden tan, and the press sinks generously into its base.
The guest book
We hesitated over the journals. A company of Airbnb's scale hardly lacks for objects, and for a while nothing we sketched earned its place. Then the obvious arrived: a wrap journal in a host's hallway is a guest book waiting to happen. The corner die is an open book, a door ajar on one page and handwritten entries on the other, with GUEST BOOK beneath – pressed large in the corner of gray sand and black, the two quiet poles of their palette.
We made this out of love. Leatherius Woodman is on a mission to create and share artifacts of beauty, craft and love – this study is one of them, and we hope the feeling is mutual. Every image is a render – how we prototype before cutting a die.
If you're Airbnb and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.