Watch collectors will spend five or six figures on a timepiece without much hesitation. Ask the same collector to pay fairly for a handmade strap, and the mood shifts. Suddenly every dollar gets weighed twice. It is an odd kind of logic, lavish on the watch, reluctant on the hands that finish it. Collectors will rave about how a watch movement is hand finished but pay no due to the hand finished strap. I’d like to share what goes into making a watch strap and the amount of work that needs to be done.
I met Ellis by chance and he just graduated from medical school. He also makes some of the most carefully finished watch straps in Singapore. He does it by hand, in his spare time, because he finds it cathartic. The two facts sit oddly together until you talk to him for an hour. Then they make perfect sense. There is something fitting about a future doctor finding calm in a craft built on steady hands and fine margins. Surgeons measure in millimetres. So does Ellis, with a skiving knife instead of a scalpel - at least for now.
Ellis describes himself modestly. "I am a rather ordinary Singaporean son," he says. He mentions a close-knit extended family he sees often. He plays tennis with friends and travels whenever his schedule allows. Nothing in that description hints at a young man who can saddle stitch at a density most ateliers would envy. But ordinary is rarely the right word for someone who taught himself a centuries-old craft during a military lockdown.
His interest in watches started early. At seven, his grand-aunt gave him a small Finding Nemo timepiece with a blue strap. He still hopes it is somewhere in his closet. Years later, his father gave him a Grand Seiko Snowflake for his 21st birthday. He wears it today. Ask him about grail watches and he lights up. A complicated Patek Philippe sits near the top, ideally the reference 3940. "I read that Philippe Stern wore it as a daily beater, and that would be pretty badass to me," he says. The Philippe Dufour Simplicity is on the list too. Not for its complexity, but for what it represents. Dufour is both owner and craftsman of his own brand. One person carries each piece from concept to finished object. That idea clearly resonates with how Ellis thinks about his own work.
The leather craft itself began almost by accident. Ellis was serving National Service with the Guards corp. COVID lockdowns left him with long stretches of free time and not much to do with it. He wanted a "book-out" bag, the kind every National Servicemen (NSF) carries home on weekends. He wanted it in leather. The maths did not work in his favour. "You can't buy a legitimate leather bag with an NSF's salary," he says, "and so I made one." It sounds almost too neat to be an origin story. But it happens to be true, and it explains a lot about how he works today. He did not start with an apprenticeship handed to him. He started because he was broke, bored, and stubborn enough to figure it out himself.
That first bag led to small leather goods, and eventually to straps. Not by his own initiative, though. A long-time friend and neighbour named Jean asked him to make one. "The first was an abject disaster," Ellis admits, "and thankfully the subsequent straps improved."
That honesty matters. In craft, early failure is not merely common; it is structural. A person can read about saddle stitching, watch videos on skiving, study edge finishing, and absorb all the theory, but the material will still expose the hand. Leather is not infinitely forgiving. Cut a strap too wide or too narrow and the mistake is obvious. Skive too aggressively and the leather weakens. Paint an edge poorly and it shows. Misjudge the thickness, the taper, or the position of a hole and the strap may function, but it will never feel truly right.
He taught himself the rest the way most self-taught makers do today. YouTube tutorials. Forum threads for troubleshooting specific techniques. At one point a Japanese leathercrafting master visited Singapore and ran a course, which Ellis attended. Mostly, though, it came down to repetition. He puts the timeline at two to three years before he made a strap he was genuinely proud of. A useful reminder for anyone who thinks handmade straps are a weekend hobby.
Medicine, by most accounts, leaves little room for anything else. Ellis sees it differently. "I never found it a chore to find time for it," he says of his craft, even when a piece had to be redone and the process turned tiring. He considers it close to necessary, a hobby outside medicine that gave him somewhere else to put his attention. He struggles to relax through conventional means, he admits, things like spas or staycations or simply doing nothing. Working with his hands gives him a different kind of rest, one built on focus rather than idleness. He once read a line that stuck with him. Workers use their hands. Artisans use their hands and their mind. It is not hard to see why that distinction appeals to a doctor who stitches leather on the side.
Now that he has graduated, Ellis plans to keep the craft as a passion. Not a business at scale. "I will let it grow naturally," he says, "as I can control the quality of the products like this." His reasoning is simple. Quality and volume rarely sit comfortably together, and he is not interested in trading one for the other.
His inspiration comes from an unexpected place. Rather than other strap makers, he credits his own clients. They have introduced him to colour combinations and material pairings he would not have chosen on his own. Among established craftsmen, he admires shoemakers more than leather goods makers specifically. He names Noriyuki Misawa and Catella Shoemaker. Shoemaking, in his view, represents leather craft at its most demanding. For bags, he sketches the design and dimensions first. Then the leather itself dictates the final form. A stiff hide suits a structured briefcase. A softer one wants to become a casual tote.
Sourcing is where his geography really shows. Most of his leather comes from Europe, namely Italy, France, and Germany. From Japan he has used wild boar and Kurozan leather, traditionally associated with samurai armour. He finds it genuinely thrilling to work with. He treats sourcing almost like a separate craft in itself, learning which region produces which texture and why. For crocodile, he does not need to look far. He sources from Heng Long, the Singapore tannery known internationally for the quality of its exotic skins. It is worth sitting with that detail. One of the world's most respected crocodile tanneries operates in our own backyard. It supplies a young Singaporean craftsman working out of, by his own admission, a fairly modest setup.
Ask Ellis what he looks for in a hide and he gets precise quickly. He insists on full grain leather only. Never the lower grade marketed deceptively as "genuine leather," which cracks over time under a painted finish. With full grain, he checks the animal's scarring and the thickness of the hide. He also checks whether the colour has been dyed evenly or looks artificial. For exotic skins, scale symmetry and size matter just as much, particularly because a strap is small. "Generally, the pattern cannot be too large," he explains, "otherwise it cannot be seen on a piece of leather as small as a strap." The hide also has to be thin enough to work with. That is where a skiving machine comes in.
Among all the leathers he works with, crocodile is his clear favourite. "The scales are so beautiful," he says, "and they require pattern matching which is really challenging but satisfying at the end." Getting the scale pattern to align cleanly across a strap is invisible to most wearers. It is obvious to anyone who has tried to do it themselves.
What separates a great strap from a merely decent one, in his view, comes down to fit and finishing. Every wrist is different, and a strap that ignores that will never sit right. Beyond fit, he points to construction quality. High wear points should be reinforced, either through stitching or non-stretch materials. His own hand stitching, the traditional saddle stitch, is dense and consistently angled. He pays close attention to skiving too, the thinning of leather edges before they are joined. Run a finger over a well-skived joint, he says, and you should not feel it at all.
Edge finishing gets particular care. Ellis uses a heated tool, which he calls a filetuse, to crease and seal each edge. It serves water resistance and appearance both. He does this on both sides of the strap, a step he notes many artisans skip. He also runs the iron over each edge twice, for a sharper, cleaner line. A single strap takes him about six hours, start to finish. His tool kit includes a penknife, a skiving knife, and pricking irons for hand stitching holes. There are sewing needles, the filetuse, and others that, in his words, go on and on.
Looking ahead, Ellis has been spending more time on bags. He wants to push further into original designs. The balance is tricky: creative enough to feel original, classic enough to last. He is not willing to compromise on craftsmanship to get there. One material is still on his list. He has not yet worked with elephant leather. He thinks it could make a striking briefcase or a large duffel bag.
As for where this all goes, his answer is unmistakably his own. His dream is quietly romantic: perhaps a little atelier somewhere beautiful, such as Joo Chiat or one of Singapore’s conservation shophouses. “Who knows,” he adds, “maybe in a little street in Paris as well.”
I like that image.
Not because every young maker needs a Parisian ending, but because the dream tells us something about how Ellis sees the work. The atelier is not imagined as a factory. It is imagined as a place with atmosphere, with light, with material, with time. A place where straps and bags are made properly. A place where the customer can understand that the object did not simply appear from a catalogue, but passed through the hands and judgement of a person.
For now, between hospital shifts and a workbench somewhere in Singapore, Ellis keeps stitching. Six hours at a time, twice over on every edge. For clients who will likely never know just how much went into the leather on their wrist. He started because he could not afford to buy what he wanted. He kept going because his hands needed something his medical books could not give him. Whatever comes next for Ellis, doctor and craftsman, it will almost certainly be made slowly, and made well.
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