CLW Travel × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.
A July study.
CLW Travel is the luxury travel practice of Courtney Look Watts, and by her own telling it began on a 2011 study-abroad trip to Greece. The idea survived a hospitality degree from Michigan State in 2013 and two years at a luxury resort development on Virgin Gorda in the British Virgin Islands, and by 2016 she was back home in Michigan, ready to build an agency of her own. Greece and the BVI are the named specialties, with Santorini as the favorite island. CLW affiliates with Protravel International and carries a Virtuoso membership, which in the travel-advisory world is roughly what a guild stamp is in ours.
The mark is what pulled us in. A deep teal disc, ringed in thin white, holds bespoke lowercase initials drawn with real stroke contrast; beneath them TRAVEL sits letterspaced between two small dots. Circular badges are a stamper's home ground. That thin ring reads as a tooled crease before the press ever warms up.
The mark, as found
Pressed
We pressed the roundel into forest green, which follows the deep teal of the live brand, and country gray, which answers the quiet white linework inside the ring. Black carries the gold foil, as it always does here. We had doubts about the gray running too cool beside the badge; pressed, the crease shadows warm it up.
The Lesvos squid
Courtney's own list of memorable travel moments includes a calamari-catching competition on Lesvos, and a detail like that decides a companion design by itself. So we drew a six-arm squid hauling a suitcase above LESVOS in block capitals. Purists will observe that a proper squid carries more arms than six; the die will forgive us before the biologists do.
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 CLW Travel and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.