It began on a factory shift
XILUGS did not start as a business. It started with a factory worker who kept thinking about leather on the way home — car interiors first, because that was the leather within reach, then wallets, then anything that could be cut and stitched by hand.
The first bench was a corner of a room: a cutting mat, a secondhand round knife, an awl and a spool of waxed thread. No machines, no staff, no orders. The first pieces took days and were not good enough to sell — and there was nobody to ask why.
So every mistake had to be made once, understood, and never made again. That is still the method.
From a corner of a room to a workshop in Ha Noi
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2016From the factory floor
I was a factory worker who could not leave leather alone. It started with car interiors, then wallets — cut on a mat in the corner of a room, with hand tools and no one to ask. A wallet took days, and most of the early ones were not good enough to sell.
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2018The first bench mates
The first people joined the bench. We taught them everything we knew, which was not much yet — so we learned the rest together, one ruined hide at a time.
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2019The shop shut, the work did not
Social distancing closed the workshop doors. The benches emptied, the boxes went on the floor — and the tools came home with us. Work carried on indoors on a smaller table, one order at a time, because stopping was never really an option.
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2020 – 2021We kept working through it
Two years of stop-start. Deliveries were unreliable, the workshop opened and closed with each round of restrictions, and hides piled up in whatever room we could work in. We kept cutting anyway — car leather, wallets, key fob covers, whatever came in.
It was in that stretch that watch straps entered the bench for the first time, and they have not left it since.
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2022Back at the bench
The team came back and the room filled up again. Orders were still small, but they were steady, and every one of them was made to order.
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2023Orders outgrew the room
Key fob covers took over the floor — dozens of shells laid out because there was nowhere else to work. Every make of car needs its own template, and the collection kept growing with the orders.
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2024Out to the yard
More hands than the room could hold. We moved benches out to the yard under a tin roof and kept working there — hot in summer, loud in the rain, but nobody had to wait for a bench.
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2025We moved again, to make room
Orders kept climbing and the yard could not hold the work any longer, so the whole workshop moved again — more benches, more light, and for the first time a floor set aside just for packing.
Boxed, tracked and sent from Ha Noi to Europe, North America and Asia.
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2026Our own workshop in Thanh Xuan
Ten years of borrowed rooms, rented corners and a yard under a tin roof ended here: a workshop we built ourselves in Thanh Xuan, Ha Noi, laid out the way the work actually flows.
Around twenty artisans, every one of them trained here and with seven years or more at the bench. And this year the workshop went online — with a live preview that draws your strap as you choose the leather, the stitch and the buckle.
What we make
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Watch straps
Shop watch strapsCut to your watch and your wrist — lug width, length, thickness and tip shape, all set by you. Five leather families in more than thirty colours: Epsom calf, ostrich, lizard, alligator and hand-dyed patina. Stitch colour, edge paint, keeper and buckle to match, and a personal engraving on the lining, free.
How it is made
Every strap takes the same road across the bench — eighteen steps, grouped below into the eight that decide how a piece turns out. One artisan carries each one from the first cut to the final burnish and signs off on it.
Nothing is die-pressed and no seam is sewn by machine. If a piece does not match what was ordered it goes back to the bench, not into the box — we would rather lose the week than send it.
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Choosing the hide
Leather comes in small lots and not all of it is used. Loose grain, healed scars, thin belly sections — those parts are set aside before anything is traced. A strap is two centimetres wide, so it can afford to come from the best part of a skin only.
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Cutting
Traced from its own template — one for each strap size, one for each key model — then cut against a steel rule with a fresh blade. We do not cut with a laser: the beam seals and darkens the edge, and a sealed edge will never take burnish or patina afterwards.
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Skiving
The underside of every edge is pared down to a shallow ramp. That is why a finished strap folds at the lug without a lump under the watch, and why a key fob cover closes flat around the shell instead of bulging at the seams.
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Lining and shaping
A soft Zermatt lining is laid up against the outer leather, then the strap takes its shape: profile, thickness and the tip that meets the buckle.
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Marking your name
Initials, a name or a date pressed into the lining with a heated brass die. Heat and pressure are set for each hide — too hot and the leather scorches, too cool and the mark fades out within a month. Free on every piece.
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Saddle stitching
Holes are pricked at a fixed angle, then sewn with two needles and one waxed thread crossing in opposite directions. A machine seam is a single thread: cut it in one place and the whole line runs. A saddle stitch holds either side of the break.
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The edge
Sanded, painted, heat-set, sanded back, painted again — three to five passes until outer leather and lining read as one solid edge. Five of the eighteen steps happen right here, and it is the first thing that gives a cheap strap away.
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Checked, then boxed
Every piece is measured against the specification it was ordered to — width, length, hole spacing, hardware — then packed and shipped with tracking. Three to five days from order to dispatch, then tracked delivery.
Made for the leather you touch every day
We want to be one of the most trusted handcrafted leather workshops in the world — not the largest, not the most widespread. The most trusted.
The strap against your wrist should outlast the reason you bought it.
Business information
Company
XILUGS is a brand of LunLeather LLC, a company registered in the United States (reg. no. 2023-001238208). Every strap is designed and handcrafted entirely by hand in our workshop in Ha Noi, Vietnam, then shipped with tracking.
LunLeather LLC
1007 N Orange St, 4th Floor, Suite #1723, Wilmington, DE 19801, USA
Workshop
90 Nguyen Tuan Street, Thanh Xuan, Ha Noi 100000, Vietnam
Support
support@xilugs.com · +84 963 567 901