SouthState Securities × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.
An August study.
SouthState Securities is a fixed-income house in Memphis whose public-finance desk has spent over fifty years helping public entities raise capital. Their tagline reads "Building strong portfolios and lasting relationships," and the rest of their language holds the same temperature: the firm wants to be "a trusted partner," and its bankers describe working closely with municipal issuers until a financing structure fits that issuer's objectives.
Municipal finance is quiet work with public consequences. When an issue goes well the result belongs to a town, and the deal team's name survives mostly in a filing somewhere. We liked that modesty, and we designed toward it.
The mark, as found
The official lockup sets a compact emblem of nested curved forms beside the SouthState wordmark in deep blue. Beneath the wordmark runs SECURITIES in spaced capitals, a short gold rule at its left shoulder.
Pressed
At almost three and a half to one, the lockup is a long mark, so the tags run lengthwise and the stamp rides the long axis. Two of the trio take their color from the mark's own ink: deep navy blueberry for the wordmark's blue and golden tan arizona for the little gold rule. The third tag is black, and black is where gold lives in our line – the whole lockup crosses it in gold foil.
Full faith and credit
Municipal bankers keep an old phrase the way other trades keep patron saints. When an issuer backs a bond with everything it has, the pledge is called full faith and credit. In the documents it is a term of art. Said aloud, it sounds like something you would promise a friend, which sits well beside a firm that put "lasting relationships" into its tagline. We borrowed the phrase as the motto of a companion seal.
The seal is drawn in the register of a courthouse medallion. SOUTHSTATE SECURITIES curves around the top arc and FULL FAITH AND CREDIT around the bottom, with a small star at each shoulder. In the field stands a stone arch bridge, its central keystone set slightly proud, engraver's water running beneath. The year 1969, the founding year on record, sits small in the sky above the deck. We chose an arch because it is the most honest picture of a lasting relationship that civil engineering offers: every stone holds its place by leaning on its neighbors, and the keystone only looks like it is doing the work alone.
The bridge is ours, we should say – an emblem, an association we bring to the work. Which public projects their desks have actually carried we could never know from the outside, and the seal claims none of them.
On the toiletry bags the seal becomes a maker's mark, pressed blind into the lower right corner of each front face. The stack pairs deep navy blueberry over dark espresso, the wordmark's navy resting on the most senior brown we carry.
The keychains split the mark's two colors between two fobs. Blueberry takes the seal as a blind press; the black fob takes it in gold foil, the one small extravagance in an otherwise sober set.
For the desk there is a catchall tray in golden tan arizona, the seal pressed centered and generous into the base. A tray is where the day lands its keys and coins, and we liked the thought of them resting on those words each evening.
Last, a pair of wrap journals, golden tan arizona beside dark espresso, each carrying the seal generously in the lower right corner of the front panel, blind and tone on tone. Public finance is measured in decades, and paper keeps that clock better than most things we own.
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 SouthState Securities and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.