Photo taken by Ansel Adams at the Salz Tannery in Santa Cruz, California, 1955.
Californian Character
The Salz family has been in the leather industry for over one hundred fifty years.
As Salz's fifth Californian generation, we are passionate about continuing our family's love for beautiful natural leather.
By designing and producing our own line of finished leather goods we hope to create something that is an authentic, modern expression of who we are.
AK Salz is our Californian vision of style and luxury.
The Salz Tannery loading dock. A worker scudding a cowhide. Photographs by Ansel Adams, 1955.
Our Story
AK Salz is California’s oldest leather brand.
Our family’s history with leather began in 1917 when Ansley Kullman Salz purchased the San Lorenzo Tannery, in operation since 1861.
A trained concert violinist, Ansley quickly fell in love with leather making and came to consider it an art form. Using the resources that were available to him in Northern California, like the bark from California tanoaks, he created Salz's iconic California Saddle Leather.
In 1947, Norman Lezin succeeded Ansley as president after marrying Ansley's daughter Margaret. Norman's oldest son Jeremy Salz Lezin followed him as president in 1990 and Mathew Lezin joined as Vice President five years later. Through the generations, AK Salz remained an industry standard and a premier West Coast tannery, synonymous both with undeniable quality and unique character. As Salz grew, the leather that was used for saddles, bags and boots on the frontier was recognized by the fashion industry for its raw vibrance. Demand for our leather spread and from the 1950s onward, Salz leather could be found in iconic brands, in luxury handbags, leather accessories, and footwear across the globe.
The Salz Tannery remained a family business until 2001, when we decided to permanently close in the face of rising low-cost competition overseas. We kept our formulas and techniques a secret and California Saddle Leather, coveted by leather goods manufactures across the world, dropped out of existence.
Today, as the fifth Salz generation born into this industry our inspiration continues to be the natural beauty we see in the leather we commission and select. By designing and producing our own line, we again find the opportunity to showcase the unique character and effortless style of coastal California.
AK Salz is our Californian vision of luxury.
Joe Bellas, the Salz Tannery superintendent, displays a finished side of California Saddle Leather with cattle brand marks. Photograph by Ansel Adams, 1955.
Our Leather
It is common now for the leather industry to celebrate the natural defects of a cowhide as a sign of authenticity, but Salz pioneered this thinking.
We’ve always believed the raw beauty of a well-tanned hide is what makes a luxury article fashionable— that no artificial alteration, ornamentation, or iconography can surpass the self-assured character of leather that looks and feels like leather.
The distinctiveness of Salz leather began as an expression of necessity. The rugged russet leather developed by AK Salz for gold rush pioneers embodied the time and landscape. Hides from local cattle were tanned with the bark of the native tanoak species, Lithocarpus Densiflora, only found in the costal ranges of Northern California. Tanned in redwood vats, dried, and hand finished at the Salz Tannery in Santa Cruz, these hides became California Saddle Leather.
Salz's operations grew over the decades and centuries in response to demand from notable brands in the fashion industry, but we continued to emphasize quality over quantity. 'Leather with a friendly feel' became and remained a motto of Salz tannery.
California Saddle Leather is aniline. Consequently, our process features, rather than conceals, the natural grain and markings of the hide meaning that the raw stock must be chosen with special care. The healed scars are as resistant to wear as is the rest of the leather, and properly selected hides, expertly finished to take full advantage of the surface irregularities, produce a leather of outstanding character, beauty, and vibrancy.
To produce our own line of finished leather goods, we have partnered with an Italian tannery known for their fine vegetable tanning. Many of their tanning techniques date back to the middle ages with parallels to those used in our own tannery.
Using an unboxed one hundred year old example of California Saddle Leather and Salz's forgotten techniques and formulas, we were able to replicate the original California Saddle Leather and once again capture the natural beauty of a well-tanned hide to our standards.
The secret of Salz's California Saddle Leather is alive again!
