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QP Magazine Issue 73, p15

July 2015


MEANTIME: A stitch in time

by Laura McCreddie

photos by Colin Coutts


Mia Sabel is an unlikely new one-stop shop for bespoke watchstraps


Walthamstow in East London is probably

not the first locale one thinks of for the

creation of hand-made, bespoke leather

watchstraps. However, buried in the heart of

E17 is Sabel Saddlery, where Mia Sabel –a

former marketing creative – makes just that.


“It was between saddlery and millenary,

but I don’t wear hats,” Sabel laughs, when

asked why she decided on this career path.


After completing the only accredited

saddlery course in the UK, at Enfield’s Capel

Manor, Sabel found herself mostly fixing

other people’s leather goods, while merely dabbling in strap making. It was only once

she was accepted onto the Crafted

Mentorship Programme run by the luxury

marketing group Walpole, where she was put

under the mentorship of leather goods

specialist Robert Ettinger, that she alighted

on her new line of enterprise.


“Robert really latched onto the strap

making,” she explains. “He told me to stop

doing wholesale and gave me advice on how

to improve the straps and to market them.”


The key to Sabel’s straps, she says, is the

quality of the material used. She uses British

leathers wherever possible, such as bridle

leather from Chesterfield and Walsall, and

oak-bark or pit-tanned leather from tannery

in Devon. The latter takes a year to produce.

Sabel also makes everything by hand using

traditional techniques, requiring her to

source very particular linen thread for her

hand stitching.


According to Sabel, it’s this adherence to

tradition that produces straps which are both

beautiful and hardwearing.


And, although they can be ordered online,

Sabel prefers to have customers come to her

studio for the final fit – one of her hallmarks

being the use of a single hole for the buckle

pin, reflecting a true made-to-measure

approach. Millinery’s loss is, it seems, the

watch world’s gain. sabelsaddlery.co.uk

Laura McCreddie