Katie Bean Travels × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.
A July study.
Katie Bean Travels is a luxury travel agency in Winter Park, Florida, a verified Virtuoso partner run by its founder and president, Katie Bean, London-born by the agency’s own telling, who carried that early sense of elsewhere into a working life of planning journeys for other people. Their team page says “luxury is personal,” and their process page promises, “Let us curate every detail, so you can simply arrive and enjoy.” We read that second line several times. It describes our trade too, in a way; the whole point of a die is that everything gets decided long before the leather arrives.
The mark did the asking here. A small dark-teal elephant stands in profile, trunk raised high, above two levels of serif capitals: KATIE BEAN TRAVELS, and beneath it, smaller and letterspaced, UNFORGETTABLE EXPERIENCES. An owned animal device is a rare thing among travel agencies, most of which settle for a globe or a script wordmark. The raised trunk is an old sign of luck, and the elephant is the animal that remembers. For a company selling the unforgettable, that reads almost like an argument.
The mark, as found
Pressed lengthwise
We pressed the mark on two leathers drawn from their own page, a deep forest green for the elephant’s blue-teal and a pale gray-sand for the warm neutrals the site keeps around the wordmark. Black carries the gold foil, as it always does here. The colored mark reads cleanly on white, so the deboss had honest source material; the small tagline survives the pressing, though at tag scale it sits right at the limit of what a die can hold.
Never forgets
The companion design leans on the proverb. One elephant walks to the right with a vintage suitcase balanced level on its back, corner straps and a single center handle, and from the tip of its raised trunk hangs one small blank luggage tag on a short loop. Beneath it runs a single line of plain capitals: UNFORGETTABLE EXPERIENCES. The trunk keeps the pose of their own device, so the drawing stays theirs even with the wordmark left off.
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 Katie Bean Travels and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.