Money Concepts × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.
A July study.
Money Concepts greets you as "Your Financial Solutions Partner," and the company's own story begins in 1979, when John P. Walsh looked at how financial services reached ordinary people and decided distribution was the weak point. His answer was a turnkey Financial Planning Center that a community bank or an independent planner could run whole. His son Denis joined in 1981, fresh from Florida State with a degree in Risk Management. He became president in 1997 and chief executive in 2006, and the official history says he "carries forward the foundation" his father laid while adding a phrase of his own, "Committed Benevolent Interest." The headquarters sit in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida.
We picked the mark for its geometry. A wide gold wireframe world passes behind and around a black all-caps serif wordmark, curved longitude ribs forming a run of hemispheres while solid landmasses break through the grid. Most financial logos are cautious; this one has a draftsman's confidence, and we wanted to know whether that confidence would survive a die. The motto helped too. "The more you do for others, the more you do for you" is the kind of sentence a craftsman can stand behind.
As found
Pressed lengthwise
The lockup runs lengthwise along the tag, the way the globe wants to travel. We kept the wireframe world and the large MONEY CONCEPTS exactly as drawn, and dropped the small WEALTH MANAGEMENT & FINANCIAL PLANNING line along with the registered mark; at luggage-tag die scale both would close up into noise. That omission cost us some sleep. A registered mark belongs to a company's signature, and leaving it off feels like a liberty until you watch what a die does to type under a millimeter tall. Dark espresso follows the charcoal of the wordmark and caramel follows the warm gold of the world grid, each taking a blind deboss so the hemispheres read as shadow and depth. Black carries the gold foil, and there the grid finally glows the color it was drawn in.
Carries forward
One suitcase, stamped 1979, passes between two hands under the words CARRIES FORWARD. The phrase is theirs; the official history uses it for the way Denis Walsh took up what his father John P. Walsh built. We drew the hands plainly, since a handoff is a plain act, and let the date on the case do the remembering.
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 Money Concepts and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.