Townsend Leather loves our Glove Cities community and was honored and proud to be awarded the “Edward L. Wilkinson Industry of the Year” earlier this month by the Fulton Montgomery Regional Chamber of Commerce during their annual, “Cheers to Business! — A Celebration of Business, Collaboration, and Progress.”
Townsend Leather had proud partners in attendance the receive the award, which is given to a local business that displays the ideals, optimism, and hope for the future of our region that were held by economic development leader Edward L. Wilkinson.
Read more at The Leader Herald: https://www.leaderherald.com/news/community-news/2020/01/area-businesses-and-individuals-honored-at-annual-cheers-to-business-celebration/
The feel, the softness, the warmth, the nap, the texture, the luxuriousness, the artistry, the beauty . . . like the expansive span of watercolor, the touch of leather reaches out in all directions, giving us a sense of timelessness and connection while invigorating all of our senses and emotions.
Townsend Leather’s 2019 was spent Stitching Together our past, our future, our history, & our dreams. With huge moments like the celebration of our 50th Anniversary and the Grand Opening of our newest building, The Stitch. It was a year of epic proportions in Townsend storied history. The most commonly repeated element, as is always with Townsend Leather, is the connection and love of people. People, hands, connection – coming together with hard-times-hugs and celebration-high-fives, coming together to create beauty and rest in luxury.
We celebrated Townsend’s history of 50 years and spent time dreaming about the future. The common thread is always people, craft, leather… touch. 2020 is a focused return to the core of Townsend Leather – the touch of leather. Nature’s textile.
We manufacture leather. Leather demands to be touched. And when it is, it sparks a sense of earth, connection, luxury, beauty, timelessness.
This year will continue to be a celebration, a celebration of this wonder-material of leather and the way it draws your hand to it, the way it calls out to be touched, the way it touches your heart. A celebration of the hands that craft it and the hands that love it.
Our theme of The Touch of Leather kicks in, right at the turn of the year, by starting our year off with our annual calendar gift. This year giving focus to action and the touch of your words on the page… a notebook with ample space for your dreams, goals, messages of thanks, and notes.
Please contact us, if you have not received your very own 2020 Touch of Leather Notebook/Calendar from Townsend Leather, email us at info@townsendleather.com so we can get one into your hands.
And we have an additional gift for all you active-notebook-users out there, you know who you are ;) – page organizational stickers!
Contact us for your own free sheets of Townsend-centric page-marking STICKERS and more!
Mark your important pages with page flags!
Mark important dates with calendar callouts!
This year will be full of touching surprises, beautiful leathers, and opportunities for us to connect.
Let us know what you want to get your hands on!
Want to show off your Townsend fandom? Or express your colorful love of leather?
Get your own Townsend Leather designed designer tee’s at:
https://www.townsendleathershirts.com/
The above link brings you right to a storefront for Amazon where you can place orders for your favorite color and size in any of the Townsend designs.
TOWNSEND LEATHER
Visit Us:
4 Grove Street
Johnstown, NY 12095
Mail Us:
P.O Box 669
Johnstown, NY 12095
Ship to Us:
45-49 Townsend Ave
Johnstown, NY 12095
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Townsend Leather
In what has become a tradition now, we present our 2019 at Townsend Leather in Blurview. A rush of moments and memories captured on film.
2019 was a historic year for Townsend Leather and this video showcases only a brief bit of the moments, memories, and meaning of our year. We celebrated unprecedented milestones together in 2019. It was our 50th year making leather;
https://townsendleather.com/the-townsend-story/50years
We expanded and opened our newest building, The Stitch;
We introduced beautiful new leathers;
https://townsendleather.com/leather/samples/product-lines/category/New!/
We were honored, yet again, as a Top Work Place and a Best Place to Work, celebrated many Partner milestones, said a sudden goodbye to an icon of Townsend Leather, Louise Kucel, and had countless other moments of love, laughter, and life.
We even took a moment to make our own music video!
2019 was epic. It was full. It was a blur. But we are glad to have experienced it together.
This year holds one of the most significant moments in Townsend’s history, with a growth beyond the boundaries of Townsend Ave. Down the street and around the corner, we now have a new building to call home as well, The Stitch.
Well over 100 years old, The Diana Knitting Mill building was an icon of Johnstown for years. As Townsend continued to grow in the past 50 years, it was clear we were running out of space. Even though the old Diana Knitting Mill had been abandoned and left vacant for nearly 20 years, when Tim, Jared, Sarah, Tricia, Jeff, and Shawn stepped inside to dream about the future – they were able to see through the vast amount of restorative work needed, and see a vision for a way forward. The 6 of them had searched numerous other sites for 2 years, before they came across The Diana Knitting Mill. It wasn’t until this building, the history and stories contained within it, that they fell in love with it together and made a plan forward. Under the ever-watchful eye and guidance of Tim, the building has undergone 2 years of restoration. Staying as true to the original form and materials of the building’s origins as possible. We now lovingly call this building, The Stitch. As a symbol of our collective stitching together of history and dreams, and future and past.
With the additional space this building brought to Townsend, in 2019 we were able to move Sorting, Customer Service, Sales, Marketing, HR, and Accounting out of the way, to expand our production capabilities on Townsend Ave., while still remaining just around the corner, giving greater capacity and efficiency to our core production processes still located on Townsend Avenue.
We started the process of converting the 100+-year-old local building to useable space, back in 2017. We scouted locations, weighed pros and cons, and then “broke ground” on a new venture. But it was not until 2019 that visible work on the building could be seen.
Under the careful and thoughtful direction of Tim Beckett, we restored the building that was once known as the Diana Knitting Mill, a manufacturer of various items throughout the years like clothing and underwear. It, unfortunately, was left vacant and in disarray for years. But Townsend has brought it back to life.
Everything was carefully restored to historical site guidelines. We even used reclaimed doors, wall tiles, sinks… we are keeping and reusing as much of the building as possible and where we have to get something new, we are buying used first and environmentally friendly next.
The building, the restoration process, and the move into it has been a process of love and care. We call it the stitch because of its history of stitching and knitting, and because of its ability to stitch our past and our future together.
We even took a moment one sunny day, to string ourselves along the path from our oldest of buildings to our newest, passing a hide hand to hand, to celebrate the first moment we all got to enter the building together.
Stitching together our past, our future, our hopes, and our dreams.
This growth is exciting and has been a big part of our celebrated 50th year, it hold a special place in our collective heart and that love has been equally shared by our incredible Glove Cities local community.
There’s maybe nothing better than celebrating fun times with fun people in unexpected ways, and that is what makes this silly video below, so great.
Townsend Partners took a few minutes at the end of summer this year, to rock out and have fun, in celebration of our founding year, 1969. We gathered as small groups of friends and air guitared, sang along, and blasted “Summer of ‘69” by Bryan Adams.
This was a crowdsourced video of handheld phone cameras across the company capturing fun moments of celebration and good times.
We love what we do, who we do it for, and who we do it with – and taking a moment to have fun together and celebrate 50 incredible years was a delightful and memorable time. See more about our 50th
Also, we thought it would be fun to win a sweet guitar for our ever-rockin’ President in this very cool promotion that the shipping company, DHL, is doing. They are also celebrating their 50th anniversary and have teamed up with Bryan Adams himself! to find some incredible air-guitarers.
https://inmotion.dhl/en/bryan-adams/win-guitar/entry/f4c7abe96168f3468329edbab3a9c4764af33086
We are so proud and excited to be celebrating 50 years of passionate care for leather, those who craft it, and those who love it! 2019 is a celebratory year and we hosted a jubilee on September 6th, to celebrate in style!
View our year-end/looking forward blog post to see more about our 50th year:
On September 6th, we hosted a community-driven 50th Jubilee! We invited Partners from near and far, customers, suppliers, government officials and so many more to come together and celebrate 50 years of love for leather, those who make it, and those who love it.
Food trucks, a mechanical bull, games, photos, prizes… all lent itself to our carnival vibe and joyous atmosphere. We celebrated the Grand Opening of our newest building, that we lovingly call “The Stitch”, we honored our tradition of an annual Health+Wellness Fair with health-minded vendors and activities, and most importantly – we gave heartfelt thanks to the community and community leaders for their support over the past 50 years.
Townsend Leather Sales Reps and so many of the wonderful people that are a part of Townsend’s legacy and community from around the world came to join in the festivities and add to the fun.
We love our community and we love the support we have received for the past 50 years, especially as we worked to open our new building. Our Jubilee was a way for us to publicly say “thank you” in a big way.
We have been privileged to have our foundation in such a supportive and vibrant community, giving rise to 50 successful years with many more to come. Our 50th Jubilee was a moment for us to reflect on our past and honor the ways we have been able to stitch together our history, experience, community, growth, future, and dreams.
We have grown over the years in so many ways with the support of our Glove Cities community and the drive that comes from our passion for leather. We were honored to spotlight one of these ways as we present an official Grand Opening of our newest building, the home base of the event and the future for much of Townsend’s greatness, “The Stitch” Building on Grove Street in Johnstown.
We held an official ribbon-cutting to celebrate the opening of “The Stitch” and a special grand ceremony with heart-focused words from Terry and Barbara Kucel as they reflected on the last 50 years and give thanks to Townsend’s Partners – our employees, our suppliers, our customers, our reps, and our local community and community leaders – for their hard work and support over these 5 decades and in making the opening of the beautifully-restored building a reality.
IN ITS 50TH YEAR IN OPERATION, TOWNSEND LEATHER LOOKS AHEAD WITH EXPANSION INTO NEWLY-RESTORED BUILDING, LINKING THE PAST WITH THE FUTURE
In 2019, Townsend Leather celebrated its 50th Anniversary. This year also marked another milestone for the company with its expansion into a newly-restored building. This building, which the company has affectionately nicknamed “The Stitch,” is Townsend’s new home for sales, marketing, accounting, human resources and management teams along with warehouse of raw materials. The multi-building connected complex that formerly served as the Diana Knitting Mill was originally built in 1900 and had been vacant for 16 years before Townsend purchased the property in late 2017 and undertook a massive renovation project.
The company secured a grant to help with this huge undertaking and the first major part of the renovation was a new roof and refitting of windows. As far as the interior, Townsend salvaged the wood and local artisans combined the floorboards with other reclaimed pieces of leather milling, sewing and knitting equipment and materials to create new pieces of furniture for use through The Stitch, highlighting the heritage of both Townsend and the Diana Knitting Mill.
Says, Tim Beckett, Townsend Leather Senior Vice President and lead on the renovation project, “You don’t buy wood from 1900 every day of the week, so you’ll see here some of the pieces of furniture that we built out of the floors. What we tried to do is bring in a lot of the old stuff from our mill and a couple of other mills, but also mix in with knitting, so you’ll see some sewing machines around.”
Throughout The Stitch original wooden beams and brick walls are featured prominently in open-concept spaces being utilized for modern office areas and conference rooms. On the second and third floors, the original wooden floors remain intact and Townsend purchased reclaimed wooden doors where called for to maintain the architectural aesthetic. Beckett says, “We wanted to make sure we kept the building looking like an old building.” And of course, leather is another common feature of the décor in the form of large and small swatches, samples and photos of finished pieces Townsend’s leather has been turned into and fixtures and pieces of furniture covered in the material. Even though the bulk of leather-making still occurs at Townsend’s Townsend Avenue location a few minutes across town, The Stitch is a showcase for what the company is capable of producing.
While the interior of The Stitch has a timeless feel through the mix of antique and contemporary design work, Beckett noted that all new gas and electric was installed in the building, along with a three-stop elevator to bring the building into compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act. Only a warehouse on the second floor for storing Townsend’s raw production materials has a modern feel featuring newly installed metal racks and lighting fixtures.
The need for storage space motivated Townsend to purchase the Diana Knitting Mill complex as the company sought a location to warehouse hides purchased from Germany where the highest-grade leathers in the world are produced. Townsend finishes the materials according to contracts with designers and manufacturers in the residential, hospitality, contract, aviation, and transportation markets around the world.
The company considered opening warehouse space in Germany or in New York City before deciding to secure a space locally. Townsend originally sought only 20,000 square feet but ultimately purchased the 66,000-square-foot Diana Knitting Mill complex due to the look of the building and the potential the management team saw when they walked through it.
The building features a variety of spaces, including several areas that Townsend will market as leasable office space on the first and third floors. Beckett said Townsend has already lined up a tenant with 26 employees to occupy a roughly 4,000 square foot space on the first floor.
In moving the 50-year-old company forward, Beckett said executives carefully contemplated Townsend’s future, coming to the conclusion that the building would be ideal for supporting growth or contraction by the company as the building is actually composed of two tax parcels that could be divided if the company sought to downsize in the future by relocating the company offices. “We could split the building in half, we have separate utilities for both. WE could rent that all out for office space and just use this for storage. We were trying to think about where we’re going to be and what we’re going to do.”
As the company continues to grow, there will be plenty of room at The Stitch for expansion.
Classic leather is classic. But Heritage and Excel can be classic, too.
Townsend offers an incredible array of products. We can match any color, texture, sheen, design, embossing . . . Because of these seemingly limitless options, sometimes it’s hard to know exactly what to use for different applications, customers, and situations. Three of our top products are suitable for most needs, but sometimes, customers feel a little unclear about how these products compare and contrast to each other. So, we want to reintroduce you to some “old friends,” as we answer the question, What the HECK? (What’s the difference between Heritage, Excel, and Classic? Now you Know!)
Classic Cowhide (CL) Our most popular leather; is aniline-dyed cowhide with a natural smooth grain. We use a light calfskin-like finish on it that highlights its grain. Classic has super softness and durability. This is the leather you are probably most familiar with as it the Finished leather that is the least altered from its original condition. Because of this, there will be natural variation in grain texture within a hide. Classic tends to be to the go-to choice for many designers and with its super soft hand, nice natural grain character, and light calfskin-like finish, it is a very good choice indeed as the look is one desired by many end-users. However, there are two “buddies” of Classic that you can consider for similar applications as well.
Our Excel Cowhide (EX) is also an aniline-dyed cowhide. It has the same light finish as Classic and an outstanding wear performance, but it also features an enhanced pebbled grain that results in a superior cutting yield. Excel is a great choice if the customer you’re working with is concerned with uniformity of grain character throughout the leather and if they prefer a more consistent pebbled grain look to their leather.
Heritage Cowhide (HT) is again an aniline-dyed, Finished cowhide. It has a light pigmentation, providing a protective finish and high-wear performance. Its enhanced grain texture character and soft, comfortable hand create a most aesthetically-pleasing leather. The cutting yield with Heritage is excellent as well. Heritage and Excel are comparable to Classic in many ways. Because Townsend selects only the best quality hides for all of its leathers, whether it be Heritage, Excel, or Classic, we are able to maintain a light finish and minimal alterations to the hide. All three products have a pigmented finish for durability and are easily cleaned and maintained over time. Heritage and Excel do have an enhanced grain and this provides the ability to mask some imperfections or make less apparent some natural characteristics that would be more obvious in Aniline leathers and even in Classic. But just like our Classic leather, Heritage and Excel have the hand and drape associated with the highest quality full-grain leathers. The bonus is that they have added consistency and protection. Similar enhanced grain leathers in the market can often be stiff, boardy and vinyl-like in appearance. That is not the case with Townsend’s Classic, Heritage, or Excel leathers. We strive to keep all of our leathers as natural-feeling and looking as possible.
Heritage and Excel are good options to keep in mind in addition to our Classic product. They are soft and beautiful with a light finish and luxurious feel. They are durable, have a great cutting yield, and are also aesthetically-pleasing to the eye and touch. And they can be more economical for projects that have a tight-er budget. So, go ahead and try out Heritage and Excel leathers for an upcoming project. Now that you know more about them, you can feel confident that these products provide beauty, durability, softness, and can be more cost-effective. Who could ask for more?!?! Shown here are furniture pieces upholstered in Excel leather, as de-signed by Sam Robin Interior Design of Miami, FL.
