When it comes to buying a leather watch strap, you might be shocked at the challenge involved. Unlike other accessories, a good quality watch strap needs to come from the right source. It’s easy to find a watch strap replacement; it’s much harder to find a high quality, reliable one. Whether you want to replace your strap with a proper Horween leather watch strap, or you just want to avoid being ripped off, read below.
We’ll go through the easiest way to tell a quality leather watch strap from something less than the real thing.
The type of leather matters
First off, you need to know what kind of leather you want. Typically, you get two ‘types’ of leather, with many sub-categories within: bonded leather, and top grain leather. Bonded leather is typically the lowest quality found on a leather watch strap.
If you want to get a cheap strap that you can use without worrying about it getting scuffed, start here. Bonded leather is made by using all the waste products that comes from processing leather, and then put together into a kind of Frankenstein-style leather bonding.
It’s got that obviously dyed look to it, and it’s also quite a synthetic, fake feel to it. You often find it on cheap wallets and on book bindings – the kind of leather that starts to get damaged in the blink of an eye. You pay for what you get with this: good for a back-up strap, but nowhere near the quality one would expect for the real thing.
Instead, we recommend that you look for either a full-grain leather watch strap or a shell cordovan watch strap. These are easily among the finest forms of leather around, and will make it much, much easier for you to find a kind of leather that you can be happy working with.
So, when looking at the kind of watch strap that you wish, you should be able to tell instantly from:
If you feel that you want the best quality out of your leather watch strap, keep this in mind: it’ll make finding the correct style simpler.
The quality is in the stitching
Of course, you can pick the best leather in the whole wide world – but if it’s poorly stitched, it’ll still suck!
No, when choosing a leather watch strap, you absolutely need to take into account the importance of the stitching. It’s a brave person that ignores the quality of the stitching on a watch strap, that’s for sure. Typically, the best kind of watch straps will come with a long, wide stitching.
Why?
Put simply, the longer, wider the stitching, the more durable it is. If you get a watch strap that has very narrow, short stitching then you might have a big of a problem on your hand. This is often used to try and make the whole look a touch tougher. In reality, it just means that you are much more likely to see the damage done to the watch strap over a shorter period of time.
If the stitching is good, then you will naturally feel more comfortable wearing it. If you fear that the stitching might get damaged or burst, though, then you will wear it less. So, buying cheap actually means that you get less use out of your watch for the simple reason that it cannot stay as strong as previously. For that reason, you stop wearing it quite so much!
It’s a vicious circle, and is one of the reasons that you should always go for the best quality leather.
Avoiding treatment
The last thing that we need to bring up is avoiding excess treatment. A good leather watch strap will not have been treated too heavily at all. This means that it would be a naturally tanned kind of leather that would look better as much as make sure it stays in better condition. The excessively treated leather is not what you want, and it often leaves you with a poorer quality of watch strap in the long-run.
As such, you should make sure that you do not look to use anything that has been tanned in the wrong kind of circumstance. For example, chrome tan leather is probably the most popular style used in the fashion industry as it allows for the versatility of the leather to shine through.
You want your leather watch strap to carry some character and charisma, which is much easier done by choosing a style that has avoided treatment. If you do this right, it can have a pretty telling impact on the way that you manage your collection of watches.
Making the decision
Of course, the kind of watch strap that you choose to use is yours entirely. If you are out for quality, though, we cannot recommend that you go for the lower-end of the spectrum. The watch straps that we provide offer a fine balance between cost and quality, giving you access to Horween leather watch strap designs that look outstanding.
You should not have to settle for second best when it comes to getting a watch strap. While having an affordable back-up can be useful for work purposes, if you want to look your best then it absolutely pays off to get a watch strap that is made from the best quality process and procedure. In the watch industry, quality is always worth paying for!
Source: https://olpr.com/how-to-distinguish-a-quality-leather-strap-from-lesser-...
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