Ruggero De Zorzi, Leather Artisan

    Ruggero De Zorzi, Leather Artisan

    400 400 Venezia Autentica | Discover and Support the Authentic Venice
    Ruggero De Zorzi, Leather Artisan - Venezia Autentica | Discover and Support the Authentic Venice - In the family shop opened by his father in 1965, Ruggero continues to craft, innovate, and guarantee the excellence of made in Italy leather bags.

    Ruggero de Zorzi, Leather Artisan

    In the family shop opened by his father in 1965, Ruggero continues to craft, innovate, and guarantee the excellence of “made in Italy” leather bags. Carefully planning every step of the crafting, and taking advantage of his expertise, Ruggero is able to offer a unique, original, and amazing production.

    Techniques

    Ruggero takes care of every step of the making of his collection:

    • Choice of the design
    • Selection of the Italian leather
    • Preparation and cutting of the leather
    • Manual weaving of the leather
    • Manual sewing via machinery
    • Manual finishing

    Philosophy

    Even though the offering in Venice has changed, the quality and the prices have decreased dramatically since Venice has become a target of mass-produced cheap souvenirs and counterfeit production, Ruggero, and his family are convinced that maintaining their high-quality standards and entirely handmade production is a must towards their customers and will prove to be the right choice.

    The is often a reason behind a certain price, therefore it can generally be used an indicator the quality: no one can spend 1€ and expect to have purchased a quality product and even less made in Italy.

    I’m Ruggero De Zorzi and I’ve been working here for 20 years. This family business was started in Venice, by my dad, in 1965. So, 20 years ago I decided to collaborate with my dad, and take an active part in this small Venetian artisanal business.

    Here we try to deliver always the highest quality and the best production. We have this little shop where we basically sell our products and only produce here a minor part of them; then we have a separate workshop which we had to open years ago for having more space for our production, which was not fitting in here anymore, so we could use bigger and more prominent machines. In this workshop, we dedicate ourself solely to the production of our crafts, especially of these braided bags at my back, which are quite difficult to fashion.

    In these 20 years, I have seen a gigantic change, because now we have mainly hit-and-run tourism. But I have the hope that the joy of communication and interaction with the customers might come back and that there will be again more people valuing hand-made products. And not this incredible amount of Chinese shops, which all offer the same products of a terribly poor quality.

    Touch the products with your hands, look carefully at them, also on the inside do not give trust to the sole “made in Italy” label or to any kind of easy branding. Touch and feel the quality with your own hands, and try to understand if it makes sense for you to spend 10 for a certain product, or definitely more for getting yourself something authentic.

    Do not let yourself be fooled by all those many fake products that are out there, many of which are even labelled “made in Italy”, which have absolutely nothing made in Italy, they are basically copies made with toxic components that are dangerous for your skin, and newspapers have written a lot about that.

    It’s important to understand that, if a product is sold for 1, while there are other shops that ask for 50 or 60, there is always a reason why. There is always something that shows us the quality and the price will necessarily be proportionate to it. It is impossible to spend 1€ and have an authentic quality product labeled “Made in Italy”.

    The city changes, the demands change… but we are more and more convinced that giving quality to our customers is absolutely right, and is a choice that always pays back.

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