Three luggage-tag studies for Baylee Markward Travel
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world businesses.
An August study.
Three tags for the next trip
Baylee Markward Travel is a boutique luxury travel agency in Columbus, Ohio, planning journeys for clients since 2020. Baylee’s public story begins on a small-town Ohio farm, where her grandparents’ trips to World Ploughing Competitions brought home foreign currency and photographs, along with friendships that outlasted the luggage. A solo safari through Zambia and Botswana after graduation changed her life, she says, and safari is still the journey she urges on clients first. The practice she built from that runs from honeymoons to multigenerational trips, with the discreet VIP care her travelers describe in public testimonials, welcome notes waiting in the room and upgrades that arrive unannounced.
A luggage tag suits a practice like hers. It rides along on the trip and takes its scuffs honestly, and it can carry a mark chosen for one traveler alone. We spent an evening with the public pages of Baylee Markward Travel and came away with three ideas we wanted to see pressed into leather.
Leather and treatment
Each family shows three upright tags on one warm-gray studio ground. Blueberry royal blue and poppy red are the working pair, both stamped blind, so the design lives in shadow and pressed grain alone. The black tag takes a restrained antique-gold foil, evening dress beside the other two. The palette follows her site, which sets cobalt blue and lipstick red on warm paper cream, torn-paper panoramas and postcard frames over a world map with red pins. Blueberry sits a step off cobalt, we admit; drum-dyed hides drift warmer than a screen ever will, and we chose the drift we could live with. The red landed closer on the first try.
The three concepts
1. The Overwater Reservation
A rounded vertical plaque stacks the BM initials over a single overwater villa and its two waves, in the manner of a reservation card. The 06.14.27 at the foot is our own invention, a sample date set only to show the layout. On a finished tag the icon and the date would change with each trip, so a honeymoon could leave for the airport already carrying its own departure line.
2. The First Safari
The safari design is one flat-topped acacia, drawn with open gaps in the canopy and a forked trunk over a single ground line. It comes straight from Baylee’s own telling, the solo safari through Zambia and Botswana that changed her life and that she still recommends before any other journey. We kept the drawing spare because deboss rewards air; the gaps in the canopy are what let a thumb find the tree in the dark of a cab.
3. The Attainable List
Three stacked boxes, two checked and one left open, with the word NEXT beside the empty one. Baylee’s own language wants to “redefine the attainable bucket list” and holds that nothing has to be “once in a lifetime.” A finished list is a souvenir. An open box with NEXT stamped beside it reads as a quiet promise that another journey is already forming.
These are independent design studies for appropriate client, honeymoon, milestone, or partner occasions. No affiliation, approval, or endorsement is implied. Every image is a render used to test the object before cutting a physical die.
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.
If you’re Baylee Markward Travel and you’d like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.