Cottage Industries - Montana Style: CBE Saddlery and Custome Leathers

When Brian and Corinna Ervin moved to Montana from Sacramento eight years ago, they retired their street bikes for horses and a more relaxed lifestyle, at the same time, paving the way for a new artisan business. After a horse ride with a friend, Brian returned home thinking how cool it would be to tell people he'd built his own saddle. Later, he turned that desire into CBE Leathers, saddlery, and custom-crafted leather goods.

After the horse ride, in 2018, Corinna found a school that would accept Brian's GI Bill. Brian took off five weeks from work to attend Montana Horseman Saddle Building School; he later returned for advanced saddle building. With a Montana business license in hand, CBE Leathers officially opened in October 2018. Enthusiasm for this new skill was immediate and included purchasing a full array of tools and enough leather to build another saddle.

Having a home-style cottage industry is ideal. CBE Leathers is still a side business as Brian has another day job, so orders get done Friday through Sunday and any spare hours in between.

"I do enjoy being in this shop and am looking forward to when I can do this full time," he said.

Describing the spectrum of products as "pretty much anything leather", the business creates saddles, chaps, gun slings, belts, holsters, dog collars, saddlebags, and purses, and can customize and hand tool names, brands, and designs onto any leather product of your choice.

"Belts, purses, and wallets are some of the most popular things we make. We're currently making a backpack; we do all kinds of leather repairs as well. Right now I'm re-backing a belt so it's reversible and resizing some chaps for a lady," Brian said. "We create beautiful long-lasting leather goods."

"Brian loves his tooling, he's always said he's not artistic but he's found out that the small tooling and decorative work is what he enjoys the most and does the best," Corinna added.

Rather than having a large inventory of products, Brian prefers custom orders. He has molds for the most common sidearms and knife sheaths. Customers have their choice of colors, weights, and pancake versus a belt chip style. With bags, customers have multiple choices, including size, how they want to carry it; and the types, softness, stretch, and color of the leather.

The business has thousands of dollars of leather in stock, offering many options in weights, textures, and colors.

"So customers can see and touch the leather before we start the project because every leather feels different," Corinna said. "There's so much you can do with leather."

"On the tooling side, the sky's the limit as long as you keep in mind the size of the project. On a small holster the tooling is limited so I might spend two hours, but on a saddle, I can spend hundreds of hours," Brian said.

Everything that leaves CBE Leathers is hand-made. "We get most of our leather from Montana Leather Company in Billings; they're right here and I'm a hands-on person," Brian said.

Saddle leather should be of equal thickness throughout and top quality; tooling leather should be a nice clean piece and uniform to be able to tool it well.

Taking the time to build an entire saddle or tool a roper wallet ties in perfectly with the Ervins Montana lifestyle, with Brian admitting freely that this state has had a total influence on what he's now doing. There are always a good number of saddle repairs, both riding and packing saddles, as well as chaps, not to mention, "cowboys love their tooled roper wallets."

"Brian would never have been working leather if we'd stayed in Sacramento; there we were in this high, fast-paced California lifestyle, constantly on the go. Then we had the opportunity to slow down our life a bit and move out here to Montana," Corinna said. "It's healthier in every way – emotionally, physically, we're learning to eat a lot healthier, fresh air and a lot less stress."

Corinna serves as assistant and quality control; she values the business because it's something Brian enjoys.

"It's really awesome to be able to produce something for customers that they're happy with," she said. "This is kind of a lost craft because people are in the habit of going to a store or the mall but it's much more special to get a gift that has a lot of thought and time behind it."

Though a humble person, not prone to putting himself forward, Brian sees himself as an honest person putting his best into whatever he's making.

"As far as my work, I take pride in what I'm doing and if I don't like it I will trash it and start over. I don't want anything to come back and I don't want anybody to be dissatisfied and never want to buy something from me again," he said. "I want them to see the quality and the time I put into it."

This summer CBE Leathers will participate at the Farmers Markets in Whitehall and Helena, as well as events like Frontier Days.

For more information: CBEleathers@yahoo.com, https://www.facebook.com/cbeleathers