Ruggero de Zorzi, Leather Artisan

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.