Resuscitating Dying Arts

I trained as a lawyer, and spent much of my career advising some of the biggest names in luxury - the brands whose logos everyone recognises, and whose supply chains almost no one thinks to ask about.

Much of that work put me alongside the compliance and procurement teams tasked with answering the questions modern slavery legislation requires: who made this, under what conditions, were they paid what the work is worth. What stayed with me wasn't any single answer. It was the range of attitudes I met along the way - from all care and no responsibility, to something closer to indifference - and the fact that underneath it all, procurement's real KPI was always cost reduction.

I came out of that work with a conviction I have not been able to shake since. That a maker's name deserves to sit on the object, not three suppliers deep in a spreadsheet. That craft is not a marketing term. That paying someone properly for work that takes a lifetime to learn is not generosity. It is the minimum.

I have also, for as long as I can remember, been a frustrated aesthete - pulled toward art, literature and architecture, and inclined to spend more time than is reasonable standing in front of a building working out why it holds your attention when the one next to it does not.

The Leopard is what happens when those two obsessions are pointed at the same problem. It is not a shop. It is an argument: that beautifully made things - made slowly, by named people, paid properly - deserve to exist, and deserve to be sought out. Not because craftsmanship is fashionable, but because the alternative, things made by no one in particular for no one to remember, never sat right with me.

The name, if you're wondering, is my husband's nickname for me - which is as good a reason as any. What it has come to mean is closer to the spirit of the Grand Tour: the old idea that travel refines taste and deepens a person's attachment to the things they choose to keep. Every object at The Leopard has been found this way - in a workshop with no shopfront, in a conversation with a maker willing to explain exactly how something is made and why it is still made that way. Nothing here comes from a catalogue.

We favour objects that feel collected rather than manufactured - pieces with character and longevity, made by hands whose names we know.

Justin Cudmore