Her father’s name has been on that shop window since 1949. At sixty‑eight, Loretta Halcomb is doing the one thing she swore she would never need to — selling to people she has never met.

Halcomb Leather Goods has been on Marlow Street in Berea, Kentucky since 1949 — her father’s shop, then hers. It is open Saturdays now. The waiting list for her small phone purse once ran fourteen months, so this spring she had 1,200 made to her own pattern, and she has looked at every single one of them.

The first thing you see in the wash house is the boxes. Stacked four high along the back wall, plain brown cartons, taped and labelled by hand in blue marker. Enough of them that you turn sideways to get past the bench.

“Twelve hundred,” Loretta Halcomb says, without being asked. “I counted them twice.”

On the bench, next to the awl and a coil of waxed thread, there is a spiral notebook with a rubber band around it. That is the order book. Names and phone numbers in blue ballpoint going back years, most of them crossed off.

At its worst, she says, the wait on that list ran fourteen months.

“I had women I have known since school asking me for one and I was telling them next year. That is not a business. That is an apology you keep making.”

The shop is still there. It is open Saturdays.

Her father opened Halcomb Leather Goods the year before she was born. Shoe repair, harness, boots, anything that came through the door with a broken strap on it. Loretta went to work in it the summer she turned fourteen and took it over outright when he died in 1986.

For most of thirty-eight years the lights were on six days a week. Two counties over, people knew where to bring a bag that was worth fixing. This paper ran a piece in 2019 on what was left of the leather trades around here; she was the only full-time name on the list.

It is open Saturdays now. One Thursday in the month as well, if she has repairs to hand back. The rest of the week the making happens at a bench in the wash house behind her house, where it is warmer and she does not have to drive.

The Saturdays about cover the rent. Some months they do not.

I asked the obvious question, which is why she does not simply let the lease go and work from home.

“Because his name is on that window. Seventy-seven years it has said Halcomb on it. I am not going to be the one who takes it down over a slow month.”

She says it without any drama at all, the way you would say you had decided against a new roof this year.

The one thing people kept coming back for

It started with a purse she bought at a department store about twelve years ago — the third that year. The strap frayed at the ring inside five weeks.

“I set it on the bench next to a wallet I stitched in 1979 that a woman at my church is still carrying,” she says. “And I thought: nobody makes anything with any love in it anymore.”

So she made herself one. A small crossbody worn at the hip, a clear window on the back so the phone stays in and the screen still works through it, card slots a driver’s license actually fits into, a strap that lifts off at both ends.

Then something happened that she did not plan for. Women came back for a second one. Then for a sister, a daughter, a friend from church who had seen theirs at a supper and asked where it came from. By the fourth year she was making more purses than everything else on the shelf put together.

So the shelf changed. The belts went first, then the checkbook covers, then most of the repair work.

“I did not decide to make phone purses. The customers decided. I just finally quit arguing with them.”

For eleven years she stitched every one herself

Every purse she sold for the first eleven years came off that bench by hand. Cut, skived, edges burnished, saddle-stitched two needles at a time, the way her father taught her. Fourteen hours a purse.

That is also the arithmetic that beat her. One woman, two hands, and a list that kept getting longer.

She had two options and she is straightforward about both. Keep the wait and keep turning people away, or let somebody else run the machine.

“I was not going to make it worse to make it faster. Either it was going to be the same bag or it was not going to be at all. So I found people who could sew it right, and I stood over the pattern until they did.”

The run of 1,200 was made in a small workshop, on machines, to her pattern. She will tell you that plainly and this page will not pretend otherwise.

Everything except the stitching is still hers. She drew it. She set the strap length, the slot widths, the position of the window seam. She sent six samples back before one passed. And nothing leaves that wash house without going across her bench first.

“Nineteen of them have not gone back in the box,” she says, and points at a shelf where nineteen purses sit apart from the rest. “Those are mine to deal with. Nobody is paying thirty-nine dollars for a crooked seam.”

She still hand-stitches one now and then, start to finish, for somebody she knows. Those take fourteen hours and would have to sell for around two hundred and forty dollars. They are not what is on this page, and she would rather you knew the difference than found it out later.

The parts nobody bothers to get right

Six of the seven samples went back. Her list is written on the back of a feed store calendar page and it is still on the bench.

1. Strap too short. “It hit me under the arm. A crossbody that rides under your arm is just a purse you cannot get into.”
2. Card slots too narrow. A Kentucky driver’s license went in and would not come back out without two hands.
3. The flap needed two hands to open. “The whole point of the thing is one hand.”
4. The zip pull was too small to grab. “Pretty little gold tab. Try it in January with dry fingers.”
5. It would not close over a phone with a case on it. That one she sent back twice.
6. The window wrinkled the first time she pressed on it hard.

I asked what a person who does not know leather should look at, to tell a good small bag from a cheap one. She did not hesitate, which tells you she has answered this at a fair table a thousand times.

1. Pull on the ring where the strap attaches. Just take up the slack. The panel behind it should stay flat. If it puckers, the ring is set through one layer and it will let go inside a year. “That is where every cheap bag in America fails, and it is the one thing you can check before you take the tags off.”
2. Run a thumbnail along a cut edge. Sealed and slick, not fuzzy. A fuzzy edge is an unfinished edge, and an unfinished edge drinks water.
3. Look at the window seam from the inside. Stitched in, or glued in. Glue lets go in a hot car.

• Size. 7.5″ × 4.5″ × 2.5″. Fits a large phone with the case on.
• Clear touch window on the back — read a text, take a call, punch in a code without taking the phone out.
• Six card slots, a bill slot, a zip coin pocket, and two zipped compartments beside the phone.
• Lift-off strap, adjustable to 52″.
• Wipe-clean man-made leather — see below.
• Eight colours, named after what she can see out the workshop window.

It is not real leather, and she says so first

Loretta brought this up herself, four minutes in, before I had asked.

“I have worked real leather my whole life, so let me be straight with you: this bag is not real leather. It is a man-made leather, and I picked it on purpose.”

Real leather in this size, done properly, would have to sell around two hundred and forty dollars. It would weigh half again as much, want a year of carrying before it softened, mark if you set it down in the wet, and it does not forgive a July afternoon in a parked car. This wipes clean, stays light and does not crack.

She is equally blunt about what it will not do. It will not read your fingerprint or your face through the window — no purse of this kind will. “Mine never did either. I punch my code in and get on with my day.”

You have probably owned the other kind

The one from the multipack. The strap fraying at the ring by the second month. The one that looks exactly like the bag on the woman beside you, because a factory stamped out ten thousand of them last Tuesday.

Most of us have carried it — or carried a whole handbag we did not want, just to have somewhere for a phone to go.

“When the phone lives in the bag instead of your hand, you look up more. I did not design it for that. But every woman who has carried one for a year has said some version of it back to me.”

Renae is the reason any of this is online

Renae Halcomb is forty-four and a nurse in Lexington. She found the workshop that could make her mother’s pattern. She sat at the kitchen table in March with a laptop, built the page, took the photographs and worked out how somebody in Oregon is supposed to pay for something.

“I asked Mama for her email address,” Renae says. “She had to go find where she wrote it down. On a card. In the drawer with the twine.”

Loretta does not own a computer. Fifty-four years of business came from word of mouth, a shop window and a folding table at the fair twice a year, and for a long time that was plenty, because the people who needed her could drive to her.

“Everybody in three counties knows who my mother is,” Renae says. “I am trying to find out whether that is worth anything to people who cannot get here. That is the whole plan.”

Her mother, for the record, is not winding anything down. She is at the bench most mornings by seven and still takes small repairs for next to nothing.

“People keep telling me I have earned a rest, and I keep thinking — a rest from what? This is the part of the day I like.”

There is one more thing happening in that wash house, and it is the reason Renae drives down on Sundays.

Her mother is teaching her the saddle stitch.

“I am slow,” Renae says. “My stitches wander and she tells me so. I am not going to quit nursing and I am not going to be a leatherworker. But she knows how to do something almost nobody around here knows how to do anymore, and it seemed stupid to let that sit in one person.”

Loretta is characteristically unsentimental about it, right up until she is not.

“It does not have to be a business after me. I would just like it if somebody in this family could still do it. Then it did not stop with me, and it did not stop with Daddy either.”

The first run she has ever sold outside her own county

Loretta paid for it herself, out of her savings. It is the largest single thing she has ever spent money on that was not a truck or a roof, and she signed for it at sixty-eight.

The price is $39. A hand-stitched one would have to be around $240, and she cannot make those at any volume anymore, so that number is a comparison and nothing else.

She asked me to write one thing exactly: nothing here is a closing-down sale. She is not liquidating and she is not retiring. It is one run, made to her pattern, sold outside Madison County for the first time in fifty-four years.

What it is meant to do is keep the Saturdays going, and the window with her father’s name on it, for a while longer than the rent would otherwise allow.

What buyers say

Why people keep them

• Her pattern, corrected seven times. Fourteen months and six rejected samples before one was right.
• Checked by her hands, every one. Strap anchor, cut edges, zipper, flap, slot corners. Nineteen of the first run did not pass.
• Use the phone without opening it. Read a text, take a call, punch in a code — it never leaves the bag.
• Everything has its own pocket. Six card slots sized for a licence, a bill slot, a zip coin pocket, two zipped compartments.
• A strap that actually reaches. Fifty-two inches, detachable at both ends. At the hip, not under your arm.
• Fifty-four years behind it. And one small purse the customers chose for her.

The short version

This is the small purse a leatherworker made because she could not find one she liked.

Loretta Halcomb stitched every one by hand for eleven years and sold them out of her own shop window in Berea, Kentucky, until the orders outgrew what two hands can do. Then she moved the sewing to a workshop and kept the pattern, the standard and the last look for herself. It holds a phone, six cards, bills and change, and you can use the phone without taking it out. Fifty-four years of leatherwork are in the way it is put together. This is the first time any of it has been sold outside her own county — and the shop with her father’s name on the window is still open on Saturdays.

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