Made out of necessity.
Leatherwork started as a way to keep moving, get home, and make something useful with his own hands.
Founder story
I didn’t set out to build a leather goods company.
I started working with leather because I needed to make my way home. What began as a way to survive on the road eventually became Oldis Road — and one accidental wallet design became the piece that started everything.
Watch the story
I’m Jonathan, the founder of Oldis Road. The honest version is that I didn’t start this because I had some clean business plan.
I grew up on a small island on the east coast of Canada, where your name follows you. If you do good work, people know. If you cut corners, people know that too. That stayed with me.
Years later, I was backpacking from the top of Africa to the bottom. By the end of it, I was out of money, without a stable place to stay, and trying to figure out how to get home.
Leather became the way forward. I made things for myself first — a journal cover, then a bag. I learned the lock stitch in southern Africa. I started selling what I could make because I needed enough money to get a plane out.
It wasn’t polished. It was necessity. I was making leather goods by hand, selling them while traveling, and learning in public. Then people started noticing the work. They could see the designs were different. They could see the quality was made to last. They started asking me to make pieces for them.
The mistake became the breakthrough.
In 2014, I was in Colombia when my brother called me over a bad Skype connection. He wanted a wallet. I tried to make what he described, but I built it from one piece of leather and accidentally flipped the design the wrong way.
At first, it was wrong. The bills didn’t come out the way they were supposed to. But when I turned the wallet around, the cash sat vertically. It felt better in the hand. It was simpler. More natural. More useful.
I wasn’t trying to invent a vertical wallet. It just happened.
That mistake became the Oldis One — the wallet that started this next chapter of Oldis Road. It became our best seller, the piece people kept coming back for, and the product that helped turn a survival craft into a real company.
We still build with that same standard: make it useful, make it simple, make it strong, and stand behind it. If something fails because of how we made it, you send it back and we send you a new one.
Oldis Road exists because of that road — the long one, the rough one, the one that forced me to learn by making. I’m glad you’re here.
What shaped Oldis Road
Improved by use.
The best designs came from real life — travel, repetition, mistakes, and seeing what actually worked.
Built to last.
Oldis Road still carries the same promise: no shortcuts, no disposable goods, and no product we are afraid to stand behind.
It started with one accidental wallet.
The Oldis One was not designed to follow a category. It came from a mistake, a flip of the hand, and the realization that simpler could be better.
See the wallet that started it