Travel With Merritt × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.
A July study.
Travel With Merritt is the boutique practice of Merritt Olson, a luxury travel advisor who books the world's better hotels so the welcome is arranged before her clients land. She describes herself as “a top-producing advisor on one of the country's leading luxury travel teams,” which is a frank way of saying the boutique runs on big-team relationships, and the line of hers we kept rereading promises “recognition that's already waiting at the front desk.” Her particular gift is “luxury family and multigenerational travel,” the hard art of sending three generations on one trip and having each come home certain it was planned for them. Our own records place the practice in Portland, Oregon.
The site sets her name in an elegant serif, dark on a light ground, and that wordmark carries the whole identity. As a stamping subject it tempted us twice over. MERRITT doubles both its R and its T, and a doubled letter is a pleasure under a die; the tool bites twice in a row and the eye hears the echo. The strokes run slightly fine, though, and fine serifs are the part of any mark a press treats least kindly, so this study became partly a test of how much delicacy warm leather will hold.
As found
The mark this study proposes
We call the proposed mark Already Waiting, after the front-desk line. One classic concierge bell in bold, even outline: a smooth dome on a base bar that runs a button-width wider at either end, with a short stem on the crown carrying a small round button. Two curved ding strokes float above at forty-five degrees, one to each side, so the bell is caught mid-ring with no hand anywhere near it. Somebody rang before you arrived, which is precisely the service. Beneath the bar, TRAVEL WITH MERRITT runs the same width in plain capitals.
Pressed
Both marks were pressed lengthwise on warm caramel, which follows the tan and gold warmth of her hotel photography, and on pale gray-sand, which follows the quiet editorial ground of the page. Black with gold foil is the automatic third. There the foil gets the last word, since a front desk should glint a little before you reach it.
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 Travel With Merritt and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.