Fifth Meridian Travel × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study

From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.

A July study.

Fifth Meridian Travel is a full-service, multilingual travel-management company headquartered in New York City, with further offices in Los Angeles and Milan. Their specialists curate luxury holidays around the experience each traveler is actually after, and the concierge work carries on once the trip is underway. Privacy and confidentiality are named among their core values, which tells you something about who calls them. Their current line is “For The Trip Of A Lifetime.”

What drew us in is the mark. An antique armillary sphere fills the ground in dense black linework, calibrated rings above ornate scrollwork legs, and the stacked serif words Fifth Meridian TRAVEL run across it between two long rules. Through the whole arrangement drops a single dark-red vertical line, from the top ring down to the base. An agency named for a line of longitude, drawing that line in red through an instrument built to find one, has done half our work before we ever inked a plate.

The mark, as found

Fifth Meridian Travel mark

Pressed

Deep dark espresso holds the old-world black of the engraving while deep sangria answers the red meridian, and the two make a natural pair. Black with gold foil completes the family. The historic linework runs fine, finer in places than a die wants to hold, so we kept the relations of the rings true and let the smallest graduations soften in the leather. We thought about redrawing them heavier. In the end the honest press seemed the better tribute, though a hand loupe will find the compromise.

Fifth Meridian Travel mark on three leather luggage tags

The fifth meridian

For the companion we drew a small globe carrying five meridians. Four behave. The fifth lifts free of the sphere and continues as a dashed flight path, arcing away above the words FOR THE TRIP OF A LIFETIME. Pressed portrait, the arc gets the room it needs to leave.

Five-meridian globe and flight path made for Fifth Meridian Travel

Five-meridian globe and flight path on three leather luggage tags

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 Fifth Meridian Travel and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.