Sometimes, within the craft community, a debate flares up that appears technical at first glance: hand stitching or machine stitching.

Some defend hand stitching as the benchmark of strength, pointing to its origins in saddlery. Others answer that a truly professional machine stitch requires no less discipline, and that in everyday leather accessories the seam is rarely the point of failure.

What unsettles me in these discussions is something simple. We talk about the method as if it alone determines the quality of an object. Yet a method is only a tool. Quality is born from a chain of decisions: the construction, the materials, the geometry of key junctions, the precision of execution, and the attention paid at every stage.

The paradox is that most clients almost never come back with a complaint about the seam. More often a piece of hardware fails, a mechanism wears out, or high contact zones take the first hit. In that sense, it is easy to end up proving something no one actually asked you to prove.

And yet the seam remains a charged topic. I suspect the reason is not strength, and not speed. The seam has become a marker of belonging. A way to separate “ours” from “theirs”. A place where makers defend not a technology, but an identity, and the right to be taken seriously.

Perhaps the more honest question is not hand or machine. Perhaps it is this: what is a person truly buying, function, aesthetics, tradition, a certain feeling, a story, control, or the quiet confidence that nothing was done by compromise.