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One Of A Kind
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Valli Muthiah and her husband worked with our Bespoke team to craft one-of-a-kind wallets. Here she shares the story of creating the pieces, along with an unexpected twist…
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My husband and I were looking for wallets which would hold everything we needed – often there were not enough credit card slots, not enough space for cash and coins, store cards, photos of the family, and because I'm Hindu, one or two religious pictures. So I'd carry a wallet, a pouch, and something else.
One day we went into the Bespoke Store and said can we make a wallet each that will fit everything we need. That's how the process started. We counted my cards and worked out what I would need to put in the different slots. We went in a couple of times to discuss the details, then the drawings were drafted. My husband thought he'd write a message for me beside my name. He didn't tell me what he was writing, and his message was a little joke – ‘Save some for me…’ – which made all of us laugh in the store. In his there wasn’t much space, so we put his initials, and the year of his birth. It’s a special process, going into the store and working with the team.
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Next we chose the leathers. Colourwise, I always like black – black clothes, black leather, black everything. But I said, I need something different and chose a beautiful London Grain leather in Medium Grey. My husband's leather is beautiful – Tan Butter Leather – it's very soft and smooth and has aged beautifully. It's really very vintage looking now, carrying it every day in his back pocket, the heat of a human body has aged it and brought out the different shades of leather colour.
First they created the toile, which we used for a few days, to see whether it worked for us. I remember my husband saying the toile looked so good he didn’t need the final wallet! We made a few tweaks – the cards slots were a bit tight, and we finalised a few other details – and then we decided to go ahead, and about six weeks later our beautiful new wallets arrived.
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A few years later, I was in London and I took a short tube ride from Green Park to Knightsbridge on a Monday afternoon and I took out my wallet to touch in and out, and when I got out at Knightsbridge, I didn't have the wallet, it had been stolen. I lost a bit of cash and had to cancel all my cards, but I thought what am I going to do, this was such a beautiful wallet – I wanted it back. I stopped off at Penny at the Bespoke Store three days later and she said ‘it’s not a problem, we have the toile, we can remake it’. That’s the beauty of Bespoke – today I can't see the difference at all between my original, down to the handwritten script.
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I love that no one else has this wallet, it's made just for me – the colours, the message, the space to carry everything I need. And I love to think about maybe one day passing it on to a child – we have two daughters, or maybe my husband will pass on his, if we have a grandson. They are really very special pieces.
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