Vanner Inc. × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.
An August study.
Vanner Inc. has been converting power in Hilliard, Ohio since 1977. On paper they build inverters and energy-management systems for commercial vehicles. In the world, when an ambulance around Hilliard is keeping life-support equipment running, there is a fair chance a Vanner box is doing the quiet work behind it. Their gear rides in transit buses and heavy trucks too, anywhere the vehicle is the workplace and the power has to be there. Since 2024 they have carried the work forward as a Havis company, with the Hilliard plant still one of the design centers.
We came to them through the manufacturing side, and it won us over. An industry profile of the plant from 2008 quotes Vanner's vice president of operations on a circular organization in which "Responsibility and decision-making is placed where the action is." Teams there regenerated their schedule every morning and built only what they could finish that day, one piece at a time. We kept both of those lines close while we designed.
The mark, as found
The wordmark we worked from is the hybrid-era mark kept in Vanner's archive: wide italic capitals crossed by a single red electrical wave, sky held in the top of the letters and green land in the bottom. The old vanner.com address now hands its visitors to Havis, so we treated this mark as a chapter of the company's history and worked from the archive. A logo with a waveform already running through it is a gift to a die maker.
Pressed
We pressed the full wordmark, wave and all, along a family of lengthwise luggage tags in the mark's own colors. The signal red of the waveform chose a poppy red tag, and the sky inside the upper letterforms chose blueberry navy. The green landscape in the lower half takes a forest green tag of its own. Each press is a blind deboss, tone on tone, so the wave reads as pure relief in the leather.
The lifeline
One detail from the research stayed with us: local ambulances power their life-support equipment through Vanner inverters. So the companion seal begins as Vanner's own sine wave, and at the center of the circle the trace rises once into a heartbeat before settling back into clean power. VANNER arcs over the top of the seal and HILLIARD OHIO closes the bottom.
On keychains the seal becomes something a plant team would actually carry. The poppy red fob takes a blind press. The black fob carries the gold, and against black leather the gilded trace reads like an energized busbar.
The same seal sits low in the corner of a toiletry kit stack, blueberry over dark espresso, pressed blind at maker's-mark scale. A kit like this belongs to the engineer whose commissioning trip ran three days longer than the ticket said.
One piece at a time
The 2008 plant profile gave this study its second die. It sets ONE PIECE over AT A TIME in slab capitals beneath a row of five small squares with the last one filled in, and signs itself VANNER at the base. A journal keeps the same faith, since a page holds one day. We pressed the mark generously in the lower corner of two wrap journals, one in blueberry and one in forest green, the two colors the old letterforms held.
The conversion
Every electrical engineer knows the box: a square with a diagonal across it, direct current marked in one corner and a sine wave in the other. It is the schematic symbol for the thing Vanner has built for nearly fifty years. On our third die the DC line runs in from the left and leaves the box as alternating current, with POWER CONVERSION SINCE 1977 set beneath and a small circuit trace guarding each corner. Anyone from the Hilliard floor will read it at a glance. Everyone else will simply see a handsome emblem, which is its own kind of test passed.
We pressed it deep into the golden tan of an arizona valet tray, the square of the symbol answering the square of the tray. This is where the pocket contents of a long shift land at night.
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 Vanner Inc. and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.