Corter Leather

Handmade Copper Cuffs are live! Click through images to purchase

Solid Brass Bottlehooks are live! Click through image to purchase

(Click HERE to go to product page)
A lot of you know her as Miss Corter, but most folks call my girlfriend “Jocelyn”. Jocelyn has Crohn’s Disease, which is an autoimmune disease of the GI tract. It causes her intestines to swell up so much that she can’t absorb any nutrients from the food she eats (among other things).
It sounds scary, but Miss Corter had been in remission using an arthritis medication called Remicade since she was 13 to treat the inflammation. However in early 2012 it stopped working as well and she was taken off of it. See, Crohn’s is mostly treated with drugs designed for other diseases, and the doctor’s aren’t really fond of keeping patients on these medications if they’re not doing what they’re supposed to (because, for example, very little research has been done on the long term effects of an intense arthritis drug on a 13 year old girl). People with Crohn’s respond very differently to this wide array of different drugs, and there is no cure or definitive path to remission. The new drugs they gave her didn’t work.
In April and May of last year we started spending a lot of extra time in hospitals around the city. Once her Crohn’s flared, other things like her childhood Asthma and anemia came back as well. Because of the swelling, food stopped working. She lost 30 pounds in a matter of weeks because her body couldn’t process anything. I now joke that she looked like a bobble head because she was so very tiny, but yea…she looked like a fucking bobble head. It was super scary.
I spent a good chunk of 2012 splitting my time between the hospital and the workshop. Because ever Crohn’s patient responds uniquely, a lot of the treatment is more or less “take this and see what happens”. In late July, during what would be her most recent week-long hospital stay, a new doctor finally decided to try putting her back on her old medicine. Though it was a higher dosage, it worked immediately. 7 months of agonizing pain came to an end with the snap of a finger, and the road to recovery began.
In the next 2 months she put the weight back on and started looking healthy by the holidays (though wheezy…the Asthma seems to be here to stay). I believe it was 12 hours after she hit normal weight that she decided to run a half marathon in support of the Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation (CCFA) and their research involving this disease. She’s running in Chicago in June with Team Challenge, and here’s what we’re doing:
The Shit Happens bracelets are an ode to what many Crohn’s and ulcerative colitis patients go through every day with a smile on their face, the good and the bad. In order for this to be a sustainable product in the Corter catalogue, all profit is going to the CCFA in Jocelyn’s name to fund research for a cure- that’s $21 per bracelet. Most importantly, these bracelets show support for folks with these diseases fighting a silent battle, because most usually keep it to themselves. Wear one for a few days, and I guarantee you’ll find you know more Crohn’s and ulcerative colitis patients than you’d ever imagined.

I’ve been fortunate enough to have a few events in my time working as Corter Leather leave me speechless. I can honestly say this one will be hard to beat.

The folks at Magic, the biggest fashion tradeshow in the western hemisphere, have invited me and the Corter Van to help represent American manufacturing in Las Vegas during their August show. I’ll be finishing up the van and driving across the country, where I’ll be parking the van ON the Sourcing floor, surrounded by the biggest clothing manufacturers in the world.

I’m not going there to find retail accounts. I’m not dressing up, and I’m not printing pamphlets. I’m going to Magic to produce at full capacity right there on the show floor out of my workshop-on-wheels. I’m going to talk about my process and how I run Corter, and I’m excited to show people that making things in America is not only possible, it’s a beautiful way to do business at any scale.

The Road to Magic starts now!

30/4/13

Belts are back! Head to the shop now to pick one up.

16/4/13

Covered in Rain

It’s late, but I can’t sleep because the bomb squad trucks keep driving past and they’re very loud. I know that I’ll wake up tomorrow to a new city; a city still absorbing the shock, a city getting used to it’s new pre- and post-.

I’ve got the picture Jocelyn took on her way home from breakfast this morning burned into my mind. It was a picture that I only glanced at in the pre-, a five second pause on my Instagram feed enroute to our watching post atop Heartbreak Hill from our apartment a mile away. Even though I don’t remember the fine details, I can’t bring myself to look at it in the post-…I don’t need to. It’s an image I know well; it’s a fun skid patch on my track bike in college, a daredevil photo op when family came to visit, and a reminder of the seasons as the fresh Spring paint faded and chipped with the foliage and traffic, only to be reborn again the next year.

I’ve never been afraid for my own life, so I could never compare that to fearing for the lives of the friends and loved ones that were down at that finish line today. I can only be grateful for those that made it out unscathed, and help those that weren’t as lucky.

Boston’s a small town so most of us have friends and family that were feet away from those attacks. It’s going to be a long road to healing our little city, much longer than I think a lot of us can foresee. However, I know we’ll get used to this post- Boston. We’ll retrain, break in a new pair of sneakers, and run a fresh race…because 26.1 ain’t a marathon, and we didn’t come here to not cross that finish line.

Thanks Esquire!
Ball and Buck’s Standard Card Wallet is mentioned as well, if you’re looking for a smaller option or looking for the old style Std. Card Wallet. (Designed and produced by Corter as always!)

Big ups to friends Brad and Christine for the mention. Graciously collecting a file of Christine’s renderings of my work