Every February and every September, the same thing happens across the industry. A palette is announced. Stores fill with it. Six months later that palette is on the sale rail and a different one has taken its place.
We have carried the same five colours since we started. Black, espresso, beige, stone and a deep green. We add a colour roughly once every three years and we have never removed one.
People assume this is a stylistic position. It is mostly a logistical one.
The repair problem
We repair bags. That commitment is easy to make and expensive to keep, and the thing that makes it expensive is colour.
When a bag comes back with a worn corner or a stretched handle, we cut the replacement part from new hide and dye it to match. To do that we need the dye recipe, the same hide supplier, and ideally some stock of that leather still sitting in the workshop.
If we had launched a colour in autumn 2019 and dropped it in spring 2020, none of that would exist by now. The recipe would be archived, the supplier would have moved on, and we would be telling the owner that the closest we can manage is approximately right. Which in practice means the repair looks like a repair from across a room.
Five permanent colours means that a bag bought in 2018 can still be repaired in 2032 with leather cut from the same recipe. The narrow palette is what makes the repair promise real rather than a line on a website.
The other problem
Seasonal colours are designed to expire. That is the function. A colour that feels current in March is meant to feel slightly dated by the following March, because that feeling is what brings someone back to buy again.
It works. It is also directly at odds with selling someone one bag they use for a decade.
We would rather the bag look the same to you in year six as it did in week one. Not fashionable, not unfashionable. Just the colour you chose, gradually getting deeper.
What we do instead of new colours
The temptation, when you refuse to change colour, is to change nothing at all and call it heritage. That is its own kind of laziness.
So the work goes elsewhere. New shapes, roughly two a year, developed slowly and kept in the range once they land. Changes to hardware where we find something that lasts longer. Adjustments to strap geometry after we see how a bag actually wears at the repair bench, which is the most useful feedback loop we have.
The tote we sell now is the fourth revision of the tote we launched with. It looks nearly identical. The base is reinforced differently, the handle attachment moved four millimetres, and the interior pocket sits lower. All of those changes came from bags that came back.
The one exception
Once every few years a colour arrives that we think will still make sense in a decade, and we add it. The deep green went in that way, in 2021, after about eighteen months of arguing about it.
The test we apply is simple. If we cannot imagine still stocking it in ten years, and still holding hide for it to repair the ones we sold, it does not go in.
Most colours fail that test. That is the point of the test.
All five Strade colours are permanent. Any bag we have ever sold can be repaired in its original leather.
