Majestic Leather Cue Cases
As I said earlier, we are putting a lot of effort into finding some new leather choices for when we eventually open up to customers. This months we have continued to add some cases to stock but the main focus has been on obtaining some new colour choices from an Italian Leather supplier.
Some of the best leathers in the world come from Italy and we wanted to ensure we have a good choice of types and colours. What we didn’t factor in was delivery issues through Europe and customs due to the current climate.
With Brexit and Covid issues it hasn’t been unusual for many of our snooker equipment items to be slowed but disappointing when it’s the leather as it completely stops our progress to open up.
Fingers crossed, we should receive a new range early next week and then we will be straight into sewing and testing so all being well, we can offer more colours when choosing designs.
Most days we are getting customers looking for a custom made case and certain designs are requested more than others so we will have to keep an eye out for the more popular ones so we can get ahead on stock levels.
You will see on the website we still haven’t added any prices. The leather and materials we use are not the cheapest so we are still working on jigs and other help tools to try and reduce build times, hence labour rates rather than using lesser quality materials.
Although it cannot be seen, as a norm, we generally have around 7 layers of various materials supporting the cues and when it’s a patchwork case it can be up to 10 to get the feel we want. Obviously we could just stick a single piece of foam in there or even just turn the leather round and use the backing suede and don’t use any supporting materials as I have seen on the market at the higher end but we are trying to put heart and sole into the product as it’s something to enjoy producing rather than just a job!
There certainly isn’t a great profit in this project when you look at hourly rates and it would be easy for us to use lesser materials to increase profit margins but we don’t want to go down this route.
We are although still considering the potential to make one case with materials similar to other cases on the market between the 3 to £400 range so there is a price option with materials similar to other makes at that level. The jury is still out on this as I’m not sure if we should just stick to the case materials we prefer regardless, we’ll have to see how this progresses.
In the images below we show 3 of the stock cases we have made this month. The last case is a 3/4 case and what you probably can’t see is the top section suede is closer to the surface than the lower section. This is specific to our 3/4 cases so the top section of the cue is held firm and doesn’t move around. Obviously the pieces of the cue and equipment are different diameters so have varied heights in the sections can only help keep everything a little more solid.
If you want to follow progress you can catch up here:
https://handmadeleathercuecases.co.uk/
I also stuck our progress up on Instagram (which I’m new to) and we swiftly seem to have gotten over 700 followers so if you are an Instagram person you can also see us here: https://www.instagram.com/majestic_cue_cases/
Or of course Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/handmadeleathercuecases
Here’s a few images of our latest cases. |
