Canoe
In graduate school, Natalie Davis wrote her thesis on the storytelling power of patterns. “When you look at patterns, you focus on shape, color, etc.,” she explains. “But all of those choices have meaning.”
These considerations have always been significant to Natalie’s work: She is a graphic designer by training and launched her first venture, a home goods line called Miss Natalie, in 2007, inspired by handkerchiefs that her grandfather and father carried. After moving to Austin with her husband in 2009, Natalie began experimenting with leather, working from the couple’s new digs overlooking a lake. The outcome: a new brand suited to her new environment. “Canoe had this rustic quality to it, but it also had this timelessness,” she says. “When I think about canoes, I think about the time I spent on the water, the calm and peace.”
Natalie’s handmade leather pieces—bags, jewelry, wallets, and keychains—evoke this sense of serenity. They’re simple and straightforward, but they still make the most of her pattern-obsessed background, working in elements drawn from the mosaics she saw during her Catholic school days, Arabic textiles, and, no surprise, the Western boots that speak to her new surroundings. —meghana gandhi
