Graybar Electric × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.
An August study.
Graybar Electric takes its name from two men, Elisha Gray and Enos Barton, whose 1869 partnership grew from telegraph-era wiring into a Fortune 500 distributor of electrical and data-networking products. The detail that made us like them dates to 1929: that year the company passed into the hands of its own people, and it has stayed there. Around ten thousand employee owners now run some 350 locations from St. Louis outward, and their own words are plain about what that means: "We tie our personal success to Graybar's success."
A leather object lands differently in a company like this. Whoever picks it up owns a share of the firm it praises. We designed for that hand.
The mark, as found
Pressed
The oval is wide, roughly two and a half times longer than it is tall, so it runs lengthwise along the tag. We pressed it on a trio: navy blueberry for the electric blue that streaks through the mark, and warm country gray for its silver line. The black tag carries the mark in gold foil, the one leather that takes the pass, and the closest our line comes to the near-black capsule the letters live in.
The circuit closes with its owners
The first companion design is one continuous wire bent into a wide capsule, the same proportions Graybar's own oval wears. At the bottom the wire opens, and a small knife switch lies thrown across the gap. Closed. Inside the loop sit the words EMPLOYEE OWNED and, beneath them, SINCE 1929. A circuit carries nothing until somebody closes it, and at Graybar the people who close it are the same people who own the wire.
On the toiletry bags the circuit sits at maker's-mark scale in the lower right corner, a true black bag stacked over a deep brown espresso one. Both are blind debossed; on black leather an unfoiled press reads as a quiet shadow relief, which suits a company with a steady voice.
The catchall tray comes in golden tan arizona, the one leather our tray wears, with the circuit pressed generously into the base. Keys and pocket change land inside the loop at the end of a shift, which is about as honest as symbolism gets.
On since 1869
The keychains carry a smaller wit. A knife switch thrown closed, ON above it, SINCE 1869 beneath. A distributor of current has, in a sense, been switched on for a century and a half without interruption. The black fob takes the design in gold foil, a nod to the brass and copper hardware of the trade; the navy blueberry fob carries it blind.
The long view
"Long Term View" is one of the values Graybar states outright, and a journal is where a long view gets kept. The design strings a telegraph wire between two poles, entering the frame before the first and leaving well past the frame's edge, strung by earlier hands and continuing beyond anyone now watching. THE LONG VIEW runs beneath it in wide capitals. We considered spelling something along the wire in morse code and set the idea aside; dots on a die read as damage rather than intent, and the plain wire says enough. The design presses at generous size into the lower right corner of a duo of wrap journals, navy blueberry and warm country gray, both blind debossed.
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 Graybar Electric and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.