Scout Motors × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study

From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.

A August study.

Scout Motors is bringing back a name that has meant a capable, hardworking truck since the first Scout 80 in 1960. The new company was born in 2022; it draws its trucks in Novi, Michigan and is raising a production center in Blythewood, South Carolina. At the groundbreaking, a brick from the original Fort Wayne factory was presented to the new team and placed into the story of the new foundation. We read that and knew what this study wanted to be.

They say they are building trucks for people who give a damn. That seemed a fair bar for the small leather pieces that ride along, so we rendered a full set for the people doing the building.

Pressed

The Scout script is a developed wordmark, wide and quick, drawn in the brand's warm coral orange. On leather it travels lengthwise, pressed exactly as the original artwork stands. The trio is rendered in poppy red and pale gray sand, the two leathers closest to that coral signature and to the soft gray of Scout's own pages. The black tag takes the script in gold foil, the only tag in the family that does.

The open shackle

Keys at a truck company deserve honest hardware. The die is a bow shackle with its pin drawn partway back, a small open gap left where the keys clip in; Scout speaks of the truck as a connection machine, and this is the connection at pocket scale. It presses blind below the rivet of a poppy red keychain and a black one, rendered here as a duo. Red, because that is how shackles come painted in the field.

Open shackle stamp design created for Scout Motors

Open shackle blind debossed on poppy red and black leather keychains for Scout Motors

Novi to Blythewood

Scout engineers in Michigan and builds in South Carolina, and we suspect more than a few people live out of a kit bag between the two shops. The mark works like a liner tag for that commute: NOVI above, BLYTHEWOOD below, a single arrow making the trip. It presses blind at maker's mark scale in the lower right corner of each bag, and the stack is rendered in honeyed russet over dark espresso.

Novi to Blythewood stamp design created for Scout Motors

Novi to Blythewood design blind debossed on Scout Motors leather toiletry bags

The first brick

At the 2024 groundbreaking, a brick from the original Fort Wayne factory was handed to the new team and set into the story of the Blythewood foundation. A catchall tray is where the day's small heavy things come to rest, so it carries the brick, centered wide, with FORT WAYNE above and BLYTHEWOOD below. The tray comes in golden tan Arizona leather, blind debossed, and the render replaces its surface with the pressed texture.

Fort Wayne to Blythewood brick stamp design created for Scout Motors

First brick design blind debossed on a Scout Motors leather catchall tray

The next good thing

Scout describes its people as looking to do the next good thing. A journal is where such things get written down before anyone can do them, so the die is a single empty checkbox beside the words THE NEXT GOOD THING, pressed generously in the lower right corner, clear of the wrap strap. The duo is rendered in forest green and caramel, the land and the workbench, blind on both.

The Next Good Thing checklist stamp design created for Scout Motors

The Next Good Thing design blind debossed on forest green and caramel leather journals for Scout Motors

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.