FINISH YOUR LOOK WITH FINE LEATHER
Get some skin in the game with a touch of high-quality hide to announce your arrival
For Roman Khan and Jenn Chong — a stylish young pair who split time between San Francisco and Hong Kong — the search for the perfect leather bag started with a crummy laptop sleeve and ended with the founding of Linjer, one of the Bay Area’s most exciting new leather-goods brands.
“The idea for Linjer was born of our own needs,” Khan said. “Both Jenn and I used to work in conservative industries where we had to dress well. We had tailormade suits and nice shoes, but we were missing that last piece that would have completed the look: a great leather bag.”
“The problem was that the high-quality leather briefcases out there all cost way more than $1,000,” Khan continued. The couple felt a grand on a briefcase was too much to spend, especially when, as he puts it “at that price, a lot of what you pay for is the status that comes with the brand name.”
But Khan and Chong also worried that as they moved into more affordable territory, they would sacrifice quality. “We are both philosophically against buying lowquality things that last for a few months,” he said. “So Jenn and I were both using these horrid nylon bags that we’d gotten for free with our laptops.”
The entrepreneurs saw a hole in the market and a golden opportunity to fund their new venture.
After a year of R&D, Linjer, which means “line” in Norwegian, arrived in October 2014 with a small clutch of handsome leather bags and a winning Indiegogo campaign. Linjer found immediate success online, blowing through its funding goals for its flagship soft briefcases ($489) and raising just shy of $150,000. That combination of foundational funding, clean Scandinavian-inspired design and a growing online community set Linjer up to do nearly a million dollars of business in its first year.
“Crowdfunding has been a fantastic way for us to build an authentic community around our brand and our values,” Khan said. “People who contribute to our campaigns are truly early adopters who share our beliefs and are excited to be part of our journey to bring our products to life.”
The next step in that journey is perhaps Linjer’s most serious portage yet. This winter the company will debut its fullgrain vegetable tanned leather weekender (see “Want more leather in your life?”). And yet, when I asked Khan what he thinks is the best leather piece a man can get, he goes right back to the problem Linjer looked to solve in the first place.
“You can’t go wrong with upgrading your plastic to a nice leather laptop bag. It will make you feel and look like a million dollars.”