ABOVE, left to right: Samantha Hook, Michael Bluth and Luka Naeole craft original and custom leatherworks at Open Sea Leather in Chinatown. More than a boutique, Open Sea Leather is a collaborative workspace for leather artisans. Hook's brand, Tidal Theory, aims to incorporate locally-sourced materials, like fish leather from mahimahi and invasive axis deer hide.
"I've lived a Mormon, wholesome life; married military life; and now ... I don't know what this life is," he says, glancing around at his workshop strewn with leather hides in various shades above his Open Sea Leather boutique in Honolulu's Chinatown. In 2008, when Bluth was in El Salvador as a Mormon missionary, his shoes wore out quickly and, short on money, he learned to resole his own. Then, in 2015, during his second life as a foreign language analyst in the Navy and overwhelmed with learning Mandarin, he returned to leathercraft as a creative outlet. After making a bag for his father, he designed a single-piece flap wallet with a line of stitching on one side, and Open Sea Leather was born.
In addition to the belts and bags he now makes at his boutique, Bluth sells about twenty varieties of wallet, all with the minimalist aesthetic of the original. They are also all customizable and made to order: Select your leather in hues ranging from natural to ocean, choose from twenty-two thread colors and then watch as each piece of leather is folded like origami paper and hand-stitched while you wait. He works primarily with Italian full-grain leather—leather in its most pure and durable form—but also occasionally kangaroo hide, which is remarkably thin and strong. He's sold almost fifty thousand wallets; in between that, he dives into one-off projects like a leather surfboard bag or shoes, which he estimates take him forty hours to make.
When he opened his shop in 2021, it acted as a homing beacon for the few other leather artisans in Honolulu. Now they share space in Bluth's workshop and on the shelves of the store. Leather lei hang in the window, emulating Hawaii's beloved garlands of ti leaf or puakenikeni, a collaboration between Luka Naeole of Dame Leatherworks and Samantha Hook of Tidal Theory. Hook has recently begun experimenting with traditional tanning techniques: She has made fish leather from mahimahi skins treated with kiawe (mesquite) bark, sparking ideas of using other local hides, such as invasive axis deer, and different woods for tanning, including albizia and mangrove, also invasive. "We're trying to incorporate everything that we can source right here," Hook says. Bluth adds that "we have big dreams of opening a tannery in Hawaii one day" and transforming what would otherwise be discarded into a piece to last a lifetime—or three.
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tidaltheory.com
