Sullivan Travel Service × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.
A July study.
Sullivan Travel Service designs trips from Worcester, Massachusetts, under the promise “Remarkable Itineraries. Tailored Experiences.” Tina Sullivan has owned the agency since 2004, and the method has a patient shape: a trip opens with a discovery call, and the itinerary is then presented and refined until it can be confirmed. The agency stays with the traveler in destination. Trip-design fees begin at $525 for most vacations, which is a quiet way of saying the itinerary is the product. The current practice runs from exploration travel to ocean and river journeys.
A luggage tag is the one object every itinerary passes through, so a travel designer's globe on one feels almost preordained. The icon pulled us in on technical grounds too. Two blue-teal orbital strokes cross to form a compact globe, or perhaps a compass target; either way they read as routes drawn around a sphere, and a drawn route sits one small step from a stitched one. Whether those crossings would survive a die at tag scale was the open question we carried into the renders.
The mark, as found
Pressed lengthwise
The lockup is wide, a good three of its own heights, so it runs the length of the tag. Turquoise meets the blue-teal of the orbital icon head-on, and Blueberry answers the darker strokes of the wordmark. Black carries the gold. We expected the tight inner crossings of the globe to close up under the die; in these renders they hold, though we would watch them closely on the first real pull.
Tailored experiences
For the companion we pared the idea down to one plain globe circle crossed by a single stitched route, with TAILORED EXPERIENCES set along the line. We debated which half of the tagline earned the thread. Remarkable is a verdict only the traveler can hand back; tailored names the work Tina does before anyone boards, so the stitching took that word.
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 Sullivan Travel Service and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.