Leather-upholstered furniture inspires eclectic images like the muted-red leather couch in a college dean’s office or a white-leather sectional perfect for 007 to relax with a shaken martini. Leather lends a certain joie de vivre to a room, a fact that Leather Creations, a custom-leather furniture manufacturer in Atlanta, has taken to heart. Leather Creations produces high-end sectionals, sofas, loveseats, recliners, home theater seating, and a king size/deep seating line for the big and tall set.
Starting out as a family-owned company in California known as the Leather Factory, Leather Creations has grown to be a respected leather-furniture manufacturer with four retail stores, a manufacturing plant in Atlanta, and two retail stores in Chicago. Two years ago, Leather Creations president Scott Lobel diversified the company’s outreach to offer Leather Creations’ furniture designs wholesale. They now sell to other retailers both large and small, as well as private label for the design trade and a contract/hospitality division known as LC3.
Leather Creations offers its customers a choice of more than 300 colors in six grades of full top-grade leather, solid hardwood frames, and detachable back and seat cushions—for easy cleaning and re-stuffing—along with a lifetime warranty on its products.
“It’s important we back our product with the most comprehensive warranty in the industry,” Lobel says. “We not only produce a superior product, we also back it for life. Our free fiber for life is just one thing we offer that nobody else does. We want our customers’ furniture to look as good 10 years from now as it did the day of delivery.”
Some of the features and benefits in the company’s manufacturing principles include removable and accessible back pillows and seat cushions. The free fiber for life allows customers to not only adjust the comfort level over time, but also keeps the furniture looking “good as new” longer than other brands. “You can freshen up your sofa over the lifetime you own it,” Lobel says. “It’s a really nice feature.”
Lobel says one of the keys to the company’s success is that all its furniture is manufactured at its 30,000-square-foot factory in Atlanta, with leathers imported from South America (including Argentina and Brazil). Leather Creations also specializes in furniture designs made with Elmo leather from Sweden. These are full-grain leathers that Lobel describes as “the softest, most beautiful leathers in the world.”
“To make leather like that, you have to use the top three percent selection of premier hides in the world,” Lobel says. “Elmo leathers are famous worldwide for their amazing softness and designer-friendly color lines. All leather has natural beauty marks and it takes a buffing process to remove certain scars and scratches. The lower the selection of hides you start with, the more surface altering required, thus more of the natural integrity of the hides’ surface is removed. This is why most leathers are typically hot in the summer and cold in winter. Our leathers are the exception because we choose to specialize in full top-grain leathers that breathe.”
Along with a design team capable of designing custom orders, Leather Creations employs leather specialists, who know the business of leather and can educate the customer on the best types of leather furniture for their lifestyles.
“The greatest strength of our business is our company family that treats the business as if it’s their own, both on the manufacturing and retail side,” Lobel says. “Further, in an industry now dominated by Asian imports, even by some of the old, typical US-made names, we are one of very few companies in the US that still produces 100 percent of the product right here in the US. Top that off with having our own retail showrooms and we are even far more exclusive. You can have the best product in the world, but if the people selling are not passionate or cannot show the superiority and value, you will get lost in an over-saturated marketplace dominated by inferior leather furniture from Asia. Leather Creations is a successful business with a track record. We don’t want to be the cheapest alternative, just the highest quality at the best comparable price. We don’t try to be cutting edge, just the best at what we do.”
