IBA Business Brokers × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.
A August study.
IBA Business Brokers calls itself “The Pacific Northwest’s Premier Business Brokerage Firm Since 1975,” and the record backs the phrase. Founded that year by a group of senior brokers led by G. William Ososke, the Bellevue firm now lists ten offices reaching from Bellingham down to Bend, and it counts more than 4,400 completed business-sale transactions. Compensation is 100% paid on performance; the fee comes due when a transaction successfully completes, so the firm and its client cross the finish line together.
What held our attention is quieter than the numbers. IBA sells privately held and family-owned businesses – often an entrepreneur’s life work – under strict confidentiality, and it speaks of “win-win” transactions while keeping the Golden Rule in its stated culture. The brokers gather monthly for education and yearly for multi-day offsites. A firm this settled in its habits deserves leather chosen against its own colors, and its emblem hands us the whole palette.
Pressed
The emblem is a wide oval globe with huge serif capitals at its heart. An upper ring reads CELEBRATING 51 YEARS OF PROFESSIONAL REPRESENTATION; the lower ring answers OF PACIFIC NORTHWEST ENTREPRENEURS, and a small plaque beneath the letters holds the date line 1975 - 2026. Antique gold sits over warm parchment, drawn in near-black line work. A mark this developed asks only for pressure and patience, so we pressed it faithfully.
The carrier is our catchall tray in arizona, a golden tan that lands close to the emblem’s antique gold. The full oval sits centered on the base at generous size, blind debossed, clear of the stitched border. In the render the parchment field becomes bare leather and the gold rings become shadow, which suits a firm that works in confidence.
The keyhole pine
The tray carries the firm’s own mark; the rest of the line needed a companion idea drawn from what IBA verifiably says of its work. The sentence we kept returning to concerns confidentiality. A family business sold under strict confidentiality is a life’s work passing through a locked room, and for months hardly anyone may know. So we drew the room’s keyhole and stood the Pacific Northwest inside it.
The die is an upright keyhole, solid near-black, with a round white window punched through its bow. A single evergreen floats in the window, boughs spread wide, trunk touching nothing. At a glance it reads as a keyhole; look longer and the pine comes forward, held behind the lock. We did debate whether a keyhole might whisper secrecy in the wrong register, and settled on this: for IBA’s clients, discretion is precisely what they hire the firm to provide.
The mark runs taller than it is wide, so the luggage tags stand upright. The trio starts with black, where the keyhole pine takes gold foil in a nod to the emblem’s antique gold lettering on its darkest ground. Beside it stand a golden-tan arizona tag and a dark espresso one, both blind debossed, the espresso’s shadows sitting near the emblem’s own near-black.
For the toiletry kits we chose the arizona-over-dark-espresso stack, the same gold-over-dark chord the emblem strikes. The keyhole pine sits in the lower right corner of each front face at compact maker’s-mark scale, blind debossed on both bags.
At pocket scale the pairing repeats. On the black fob the mark is gold foil, centered below the rivet; on arizona it is a blind press into golden tan. Here the white window earns its keep, holding the pine legible on a face smaller than a matchbook.
On the journals the mark takes its quietest form. Caramel, a warm tan near the emblem’s parchment field, sits beside dark espresso, and on each cover the keyhole pine replaces the old corner monogram – anchored lower right, noticeably larger than what it replaces, blind debossed on both.
Five renders and one die, for a firm that has kept other people’s secrets since 1975.
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 IBA Business Brokers and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.