The Measured Collar
Bridle leather, solid brass, hand-stitched at eight stitches to the inch, cut to your dog's neck rather than to a size chart. Three weeks, and it outlives the dog.
- Kind
- The Bench
- Price
- From $145
- Duration
- 3 weeks from fitting
A collar is a strap that spends every day of a dog’s life against its skin, gets rained on, rolled in, swum in, and pulled against. Almost all of them are chrome-tanned split leather with a folded edge and a plated buckle that goes green in a year.
We make ours from English bridle leather — vegetable-tanned, curried with tallow, cut from the butt where the fibre is tightest — with cast brass hardware and linen thread pulled by hand at eight stitches to the inch. The edges are bevelled, sanded, and burnished with gum. It is a fifty-minute job at the bench and it is the reason the collar costs $145 instead of $28.
The fitting
Bring the dog. We measure at the widest part of the neck with the coat as it is today, and then again in the groove behind the ears, because a sighthound and a bull terrier need those two numbers in opposite proportions. We ask what the dog does — swims, works, wrestles, sleeps — and that decides thickness, width and whether the D-ring sits centred or offset.
If you are not local, ask for a measuring strip. It is a length of card and a set of instructions, it arrives in a day, and it has never once produced a collar that did not fit.
It ages, it does not wear out
Bridle leather darkens. A London tan collar is honey in its first month and old oak by its third year, with the deepest colour where the dog’s neck has worked oil into it. The brass goes soft gold and then dull, and comes back with a cloth.
Bring it in whenever it needs stitching, re-punching or a new buckle and we will do it at the bench for nothing, for as long as we are here. We have restitched collars for dogs that are no longer alive because the owner wanted to keep the strap. That felt like the whole point of making them this way.