Today we’d like to introduce you to Kyle Martin.
Kyle, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
I’m a Georgia native who studied at the Savannah College of Art and Design, and I’m the founder of KMM & Co. During my time at SCAD in Savannah, I studied Accessory Design and was one of the first students in the program to focus on menswear. I drew inspiration from classic accessory design and vintage workwear, and turned my appreciation for those aesthetics into a vision for the things that I wanted to learn to design and make.
At SCAD, I learned an incredible amount about design, but I also saw the opportunity to look beyond simply designing accessories and begin learning the art of handcrafting leather goods. As a student, I ignored sewing machines and laser cutters and instead put in the hours to learn classic leather-working techniques. Learning those skills involved significant trial and error. And while modern technology might offer faster and easier ways to do things, I have always chosen to put quality and craftsmanship first.
I founded my own brand to put what I learned in art school to work. I wanted to craft timeless leather goods that get better with age and wear, and that’s still what keeps KMM & Co. going. In the early days of the brand, I chose northwestern Georgia as my home base. I lived in the small town where I grew up and quit a job at a Ralph Lauren factory store to give my all to KMM & Co. and spend long hours designing, prototyping, redesigning, and sewing each product by myself.
I designed each of my products by reimagining a vintage silhouette for the modern world. My designs have gotten better (even if my drawing skills haven’t), but that’s still the idea behind every new design. Years of hard work (and a move to Atlanta) later, I’m not going it alone anymore and I don’t have to make every single product by myself. I work with almost a dozen people who put the “company” in “KMM & Co.” But I’m still responsible for the process of designing each of our accessories and ensuring that every design will be beautiful and functional no matter how much wear and use it sees.
Ever since my years at SCAD, I’ve wanted “KMM” to mean doing things the old-fashioned way. Every rivet on a KMM & Co. leather tote bag is set by hand. (Though fortunately for my carpal tunnel, not always my hands!) Monograms are stamped letter by letter. And wallets are meticulously hand-stitched. KMM & Co. ships leather tote bags and accessories around the world, but everything is still made by hand, made to order, and made in America. That’s exactly what I envisioned 10 years ago, and it’s all a reality.
Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Building KMM & Co. from a label that I ran by myself, literally out of my mom’s basement — hi Mom! — into a company that employs many skilled and talented people has been a long and labor-intensive process! Starting a small business on a shoestring budget was a challenge from the beginning.
Making handcrafted leather goods is a process that requires high-quality materials, and you always have to get the right tools for the job to make a good product. But amazing leather and specialized tools are expensive. Purchasing the highest-quality materials and acquiring all of the tools needed to do things the traditional way was a major challenge at the beginning of the brand. (And it’s still a challenge to some extent!)
Building an Etsy store, cobbling together a website, sewing tote bags by hand, and carting my products to and from countless craft fairs consumed lots of my time. And those efforts didn’t always produce the returns that I hoped for. Putting everything in motion didn’t get great results overnight, and I was fortunate to have a support system that made it possible for me to put a huge amount of work into something that wasn’t an overnight success.
Moving to Atlanta was a stretch, but gave me huge opportunities to grow KMM & Co. When I started signing up for the first Atlanta craft fairs where I sold KMM & Co. designs, friends would volunteer to help me out, spending their weekends hanging out with me at events and learning to stamp key fobs for customers and even volunteering their trucks to transport fixtures and baskets of product around the city.
As the business started to grow, it became possible to put a couple of people on the payroll and to scale KMM & Co. beyond what I would have been able to achieve by myself. (There are limits to how many totes you can assemble or how many wallets you can sew by yourself!) I brought on one of my best friends, Marcus Orfield, and was offered a studio maker space at Citizen Supply at Ponce City Market; those two changes had an immense impact on the trajectory of the brand and what we were able to accomplish.
Running a tight ship and figuring out where to allocate resources is always a challenge, even now that KMM & Co. has grown far beyond what I thought was possible. Everything takes twice as much work as you think it will, and that’s even true when you have amazing people in your corner, helping you out. We are fortunate to have thousands of customers to serve, and I spend so much of my time creating things and improving designs and fine-tuning processes for them. It’s an incredible privilege and also incredibly hard work.
Please tell us about KMM & Co.
KMM & Co. produces handcrafted leather goods in our studio here in Atlanta. We make a wide range of accessories — everything from key fobs to wallets to tote bags. I’m really proud of producing everything in America, with a supply chain that includes American tanneries as much as we can. I have a BFA in Accessory Design from SCAD, and every product that we offer is meticulously designed and prototyped so that I know they’re built to last. Each of our products will remain functional through years and years of use. And because we’re very selective about the leathers we use, each of our products will look better with wear and age.
Our bestselling product, by far, is our leather tote bags. So many companies make tote bags, but ours are each made from a single piece of gorgeous full-grain leather, and they’re truly designed to last forever. There isn’t a seam on the bottom of the tote, where seams often fail. And the handles are made of leather that’s won’t ever stretch or tear. The Tan Kodiak tote — something I’ve been making since the very beginning of KMM & Co. — is a product that we’ve made thousands of times over. Thousands of people have these totes, across the United States and around the world, and that’s something that’s still incredible to me.
Do you look back particularly fondly on any memories from childhood?
When I was a kid, I would often go to my parents’ work on the weekends (or days when I didn’t have to be at school). My mom worked as an office manager at a carpet mill, and my dad’s job was to fix all of the machines when they needed maintenance or would malfunction. I loved following my dad around the warehouse, and he would go into the machine rooms and fix huge machines for the carpet company. He had his own machine shop, and I loved playing with the tools (and plenty of other useful things he had around the shop). One of my favorites was a paint can with some kind of liquid rubber, which grownups would dip tools in to make a rubber handle (but was much better used to dip an entire pencil into)!
When I wasn’t in the warehouse, I made sure to take advantage of the fact that my mom ran the office. I would spend my time drawing Ninja Turtles and would scan them on the copier, and try to sell them to my mom’s coworkers. I guess that even early on, I learned how to hustle!
Pricing:
- Key fobs start at $5 (which includes embossing with the letters, numbers, or emojis of your choice!)
- Wallets start at $60 (we have a variety of men’s and women’s wallet styles, including clutches)
- Leather tote bags start at $200 (depending on the leather and customization options)
Contact Info:
- Address: You can visit our shop at Citizen Supply at Ponce City Market (675 Ponce De Leon Ave NE NW208, Atlanta, GA 30308). Our main studio is located at The MET.
- Website: https://kmmco.com/
- Email: hello@kmmco.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kmmandco/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kmmandco/
Image Credit:
Images courtesy Kyle Martin at KMM & Co.
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