Genuine Access Travel × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.
A July study.
Genuine Access Travel is a private travel practice in Beverly Hills, led by founder Gen Hershey and run by referral for a deliberately small circle of clients. Gen grew up around people whose journeys ran on quieter machinery; in her telling there was “always a back entrance, a name to mention, or someone who could quietly make things happen.” The practice she built keeps faith with that upbringing and treats access as a relationship, held between two people who trust each other, with the details settled before a client thinks to ask. Her site promises “Because Where You Go is Only Part of the Story” and, just beneath it, “Global Travel. Intimately Curated.”
What drew us to the mark is how little of it there is. Widely spaced serif capitals spell GENUINE ACCESS on a single line, with tiny spaced capitals reading TRAVEL centered underneath, all in a brown that samples at #57331E. That is saddle country; the lockup was halfway to leather before we touched it. Letterspacing this generous already behaves like impression work, each capital standing in its own clear ground the way characters do when a die meets the hide one at a time. We chiefly wondered whether so quiet a name would want any company on a tag, or whether the honest move was to press it exactly as found and stand back.
As found
The mark this study proposes
We let the name go first, as a spaced identity deserves, and then allowed ourselves one addition. Above GENUINE ACCESS and its small TRAVEL sits a back-entrance door, drawn slightly open, wide enough for the right name to pass and no wider. It comes straight from Gen’s line about how the people she grew up around actually moved through the world, and it turns the tag portrait, a door standing above its own doorplate. The wordmark carries the identity perfectly well alone; the door is our fond conjecture about what a device could be, should the practice ever want one.
Pressed
Dark espresso answers the brown of the wordmark and the private-club hush of the practice, while gray-sand answers the pale ivory ground the type sits on. Black carries the gold.
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 Genuine Access Travel and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.