Our material
Tessera is not tanned. It is built — a coated composite of a textile substrate and a polyurethane skin, engineered layer by layer so that structure, surface and hand are each solved separately. Hide asks one material to do all three at once. This does not.
Designed in Europe · Italian-grain and brushed-suede finishes · Animal-free
Construction
Hide is an agricultural product corrected by chemistry — you finish what the animal happened to give you. Tessera runs the other way: a surface built to a written specification, where every property in the material is there because someone decided it should be.
01
The base cloth. Dense, dimensionally stable, selected for tear strength and recovery — this is the layer that decides whether a bag holds its silhouette or collapses into itself after a month of being carried.
02
The polyurethane is coated onto the substrate and set in a controlled bath rather than dried flat. It cures into a microporous, open-cell structure, and that void network is where the softness and the drape come from. Cheap alternatives skip this and laminate a solid film. That film is what peels.
03
A finer top layer transferred from engraved release paper — thin enough to move with the substrate beneath it, dense enough to hold a finish without going slick.
04
Set under heat and pressure from a pattern taken off real hide. Grain depth, pore distribution and break are decided here — break being the term for how a surface folds: fine irregular creases rather than one hard fold line. For our suede finish this stage is skipped, and the skin is buffed instead.
05
A matte topcoat tuned for abrasion, hydrolysis and light-fastness — the three failure modes that actually end a bag's life. Buffed afterwards to a dry hand rather than left with a sheen.
Finishes
The construction underneath is identical. What changes is the last stage — whether the skin is pressed or raised. That single decision is the difference between a bag that reads structured and one that reads soft.
The pressed finish. An Italian-grain pattern set under heat, with the pore depth and irregular break you only get from a hide-taken plate — not the flat repeating stamp of cheap material. Holds an edge and a structured silhouette.
The raised finish. Instead of embossing, the skin is buffed until a short, dense nap lifts — the matte, powdery hand of nubuck. It shifts tone as you run a hand across it and settles back, exactly like suede, without suede's fear of rain.
Behaviour
Specification
Rows are left empty until we can state them exactly. We would rather show four true figures than eight impressive ones.
Care
Wipe with a soft, damp cloth and let it dry naturally. That is the whole routine — no conditioners, no oils, no leather balm, none of the maintenance a hide needs to stay alive.
Keep it out of prolonged direct sun, store it stuffed with tissue paper in its dust bag, and it will hold its shape for years.