Vail Valley local’s love for leather leads to new lifestyle
For local Jennifer Borr茅, a love of leather brought her back to the valley and launched a new career
Berit Brooks/Courtesy photo
If you would have asked Jennifer Borr茅 what she would be doing in 2024 she would have never said she’d be living back in Eagle County and owning a leather goods company that sells customizable products to clients like Mattel, George Lucas and the Reagan Library.
Borr茅 grew up in the Vail Valley and was a trauma tech in an emergency room in Boulder for 16 years.
“There was a moment in the emergency department where I didn’t like going to work anymore. I became emotionless and my husband said, ‘go find something that makes you happy’ so I started doing glass art and did some work with the Colorado Rapids and Starbucks and when I was trying to come up with a name, I decided to call it after my two kids and it stuck.,” Borr茅 said.
Working with leather started after Borr茅 was doing some custom glass lighting for a client in Arrowhead.
“She wanted me to created glass lighting with leather bases and I started playing with leather and realized that I enjoyed it. It was a lot of fun and that was eight years ago,” Borr茅 said.
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“I was learning the craft and learning about leather and finding the suppliers and started doing wholesale and then COVID happened. We actually put our house in Boulder on the market the day Governor Polis proclaimed the stay-at-home order. We thought ‘what are we going to do?’ We’d been planning for six months to move and were choosing from five different locations and none of them were Vail,” Borr茅 said. “My dad owned a house up here, so he said, ‘well, you sold your house, go up to the mountains and spend six months there,’ and we’re still here.”
Borr茅 has been busy creating all sorts of leather products like bracelets, earrings, rings, notebooks, wallets, tote bags, key chains, leather accents to adorn bar ware for the home and so many more creative and beautiful things. She just completed and delivered 15 custom-made and monogrammed dopp kits to the Ritz Carlton earlier this week for a corporate group. These dopp kits were literally handcrafted by the team in the studio in Edwards with certified imported Italian leather.
Borr茅 can come up with any design a client desires and that allows Berit Brooks to have so much flexibility and to gain clients and fans from all over. Borr茅 now has a small studio that houses all of the leather, materials, design templates, tools and workspace to create the goods on the upper level of the Edwards Plaza.
“We import our leather from Tuscany, Brazil, Argentina and Portugal. The Italian leather is all certified. It’s a consortium of 17 different tanneries in Tuscany that have come together with a sustainability ethos,” Borr茅 said. “We’ve really worked on bringing in a high-quality leather from that has a tag with a number that is coded to the tannery and the date on it and other information.”
Borr茅 said it has taken eight or nine years to fully learn the leather craft.
“I don’t think people realize, and I was one of those people, that leather work is a hard thing to learn. It’s a very expensive thing to learn. People come in and see what I do, and they’ll go get a laser and buy some leather and give it a shot, but they don’t realize how the leather is made, how to source it, how the laser operates, what the settings are and so on. I’m finally at a moment in my life where I have a solid working knowledge of all of the elements,” Borr茅 said.
Borr茅 said that he last several years have been a whirlwind, especially when she looks around her design studio at what she’s created.
“To go from our basement to this studio and to have made products that have the Star Wars logo on them, it’s been crazy. When we got the call to create an order with the Star Wars logo, I asked about rights 鈥� if we had the rights to put that logo on the products and the lady on the phone said, ‘yes, it’s for George Lucas’ and the next thing you know, the purchase order comes through and sure enough, it was for George Lucas,” Borr茅 said.
Borr茅 is excited to offer bespoke items like customized leather-wrapped rocks and highball glassware and branding your initials on it and custom coasters made out of the same leather as the Wilson NFL footballs for a Super Bowl Party, and one-of-a-kind jewelry. Berit Brooks can add a flair to any event and has been a part of many local events and events across the nation. Berit Brooks has teamed up with Sunward Studio to create Reverie Collaborative to create even more experiences for corporate gatherings, weddings, bachelorette parties, family reunions, special occasions and more.
“If you would have asked me 10 years ago what I’d be doing now, it would not be this. But I’m so glad that it is this. I would have never dreamed that in this moment I would end up back up in the valley and that I would be a business owner producing our own goods and wares that are going across the country,” Borr茅 said. “Add to that all the amazing people and the community and the companies that we’re working for and the level of creativity that’s coming from all of this, it makes coming to work fun.”
