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While the wallets, bags and custom leather work Artie makes are remarkable, what’s more notable is the marketing success that’s put him in a position to have a 46-week-long waiting list.
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Artie Shell, the founder, craftsman, marketer and salesman behind Mascon Leather, is pictured with his wife Deb.
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The Mascon Leather workshop features a massive worktable with a healing plastic grid.
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Mason Leather products are purchased by customers from across the globe who live in urban centers, suburbia and rural country backwoods.
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Emily Clutch with wristlet.
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The Ugly Jane purse is a misnomer.
A Good Vibes story.
Working with your hands is a tradition in Artie Shell’s family. His grandfather ran a masonry concrete company (this is where the word Mascon originated) and his father was a brick mason. Artie creates handmade leather goods, while his sons Mason and Nick work as a blacksmith and a woodworker. His wife paints and also styles hair—everyone who lives on their land off Centerville Road creates something.
While the wallets, bags and custom leather work Artie makes are remarkable, what’s more notable is the marketing success that’s put him in a position to have a 46-week-long waiting list. Through some savvy tactics and a constant eye on the best way to use social media, he’s collected 75,000 followers on Instagram and his YouTube channel has nearly 40,000 subscribers.
Even though he is a master craftsman, he describes himself as an “academic who loves research.” When he started working with leather in 2012, he spent every free minute learning, from how to stitch and glue, to design and cutting. He’d watch a video on a technique ten times until he got it down. His formal education is extremely varied (with degrees in business and education) but what seems to be a theme is that when Artie is interested in something, he gets in deep to understand all the components.
Three years ago, after his orders approached a 20-week wait, he focused on the business full time. Besides the creation of leather goods, he also studies how other leather makers marketed themselves.
“I wanted to see what caught my eye. It’s a visual business. Captions are less compelling than beautiful photos,” he said. “I looked at the numbers, to see what the differences were.”
Artie studied photography, too. From lighting to angles, the aspect ratios and the composition of the photos, to a whole wall of props he keeps on hand for staging his Instagram posts andYouTube videos.
Some Mascon Leather photos could be described as risqué, but they evolved organically from people wanting to show off. He approached celebrities and people with large followings regularly on social media to see if they might want to include one of his wallets in their photos. As a marketing technique, Artie began sending T-shirts to models rather than wallets, a better, less time consuming option for him.
His clientele is nearly all men, and so he’s always conscious of that with his content. There’s a lot of how-to, process-oriented content, along with “the Mascon girls” in their cropped T-shirts. Artie shows and shares vividly in his videos, with recurring features that reveal his brand savvy.
“Part of knowing your audience is that you can’t convert everyone. But you can see what engages the people you are trying to reach,” he said. (And sometimes, it’s demand for his Jack Russell Terrier Chloe to be featured in a video!)
His workshop is full of interesting bits–from the wall of wallets (one of each model he has made) to the massive worktable with its healing plastic grid, the tool sharpening strap and the trays of copper grommets. While nearly all the leather he works with is made from cowhide, he has a bit of horse and kangaroo leather, which is extremely light and thin.
He’s gotten some interesting custom requests, including a baby bib, a collar for BDSM play and a case full of pockets for a watch collection.
“Wearables are a bit challenging because they need to be custom-sized, but I’m happy to do a wide variety,” he said.
Because of the level of customization, he says it’s hard to identify any real trends. “People almost always find me because someone they know ordered something from me, and now they want something like it, customized to them,” Artie said.
The artisanal product trend has only intensified during the pandemic, and people seek limited edition products that include them in a community.
“It gives them a specialness to own something handmade for them, a kind of ‘club mentality.’ My business is definitely customer-driven, and there is a lot of time and effort spent on them,” he said.
He’s also gotten into toolmaking, creating a line of brass weights and angles with a partner and some iron tools with carved handles with his son the blacksmith. His leather goods are in every country in the world and he’s going to keep making and innovating. Living in a town that embraces artisanship, his business has sprung into a surprising and singular position. For all these accidental successes, Artie Shell is working pretty hard… and pretty smart, too.
MasconLeather.com | Visit their Facebook page at facebook.com/MasconLeather, Instagram page @masonleatherco, or email masconleather@gmail.com.
