Platinum Equity × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.
An August study.
Platinum Equity is the Beverly Hills investment firm Tom Gores founded in 1995, and its homepage opens with a line we have kept thinking about since we first read it: "Lasting Value Is Built, Not Found." The people there describe themselves as operators as much as investors; their own formula, M&A&O, gives the O of operations equal billing with the deal, which is a quiet way of saying they stay and do the work after the ink dries. Even the signature agrees. Their wordmark is a fast brush script whose final letter stretches out into an arrow, pointing forward.
So we pressed the signature, and then let three companion stamps speak in the firm's own words.
The mark, as found
One continuous stroke of brush script, about four times wider than it is tall, finished with that arrow. We press it from the firm's own artwork, untouched.
Pressed
A mark this long wants a runway, so it runs the full length of our lengthwise luggage tags. Two of the leathers come straight from the firm's site: blueberry, a deep navy that sits where their dark blue-gray page fields do, and gray sand, a pale greige close to the site's pale steel supporting tone. The third tag is black, and black carries the gold, the one leather we foil. On the other two the script goes in blind, tone on tone, and the arrow still reads at arm's length.
The keystone
"Lasting Value Is Built, Not Found" is a credo asking to be made literal. The die draws a masonry arch caught a moment before completion. Its keystone hangs from a hoist above an empty socket, and the wooden centering still stands beneath the stones. Around the scene, the ring carries the half of the line that matters most here, in plain capitals.
We hesitated over whether an arch is too grand a figure for a valet tray. Then again, a tray is where built things come to rest at the end of a day, keys and a watch emptied from a pocket, and the empty socket settled the question for us. It presses centered on the golden-tan tray.
The stepped arrow
Their signature already ends in an arrow, so this companion asks how an arrow like that gets its speed. The answer comes in one stroke: the shaft is a staircase. Two risers, two treads, laid like courses of brick, and only then the flight. Built first, then in motion.
On the toiletry kits it sits small in the lower corner, a maker's mark. We stacked warm mid-gray country gray over deep brown espresso; a firm named for a gray metal ought to own a gray leather, and the espresso underneath keeps it boardroom.
The keychains take the same stroke on the fob, below the rivet. One is warm poppy red, after the red accent their site flashes; the other is black, and again black carries the gold.
Judgment, over data
Among the firm's guiding principles is "Judgment Over Data." We typeset it as arithmetic: JUDGMENT above the bar, DATA below, the word over performed by the fraction line alone.
A journal seemed the right home for the principle, since judgment is what actually gets written in a notebook; the data stays in the deck. It presses generously in the lower corner of two wrap journals, one in deep navy blueberry and one in pale greige gray sand, the same dark-over-pale scheme their own pages use.
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 Platinum Equity and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.