Joe & Lori
We are Joe and Lori, and Bottega Del Vecchio carries our family name. Joe's grandparents came over from Italy, from the San Sossio and Calabria regions, and we grew up hearing about the old way of working. It was all about working slowly, by hand, and making things to last. That is the exact same grit and quality we wanted our store to carry on.
We have seen in person, leather workshops and glassblowing studios and watched the artisans work firsthand. That is why we sell directly from the people who make these goods, with no warehouses or middlemen in between. We just wanted to bring the same authentic things we found back home to you.
A short list,
kept short on purpose.
Bottega Del Vecchio isn't trying to be a catalog of everything made in Italy. It's a deliberately limited network of ateliers, each one reviewed before it ever appears on the site. Fewer names, but every one of them real.
Before a workshop is listed, we speak with them directly to verify who's actually making the work and where. That's the standard, not paperwork. If we can't get comfortable with the answer, it doesn't go on the site. A new atelier stays blurred on our homepage until that conversation is finished and an agreement is in place, which is also why the list moves slowly.
Every product page names the workshop and the town it came from, and it's not written for marketing. Materials are sourced from the region credited on the label, and every piece is made by hand, not pulled off an assembly line. If your order includes items from more than one atelier, expect separate shipments as each piece is finished, since nothing here comes from a shared warehouse.
The ateliers we work with make goods in Italy the same way they always have, each with its own specialty and history. We don't rename or restyle what they make. The goal is to get their work in front of people who wouldn't otherwise find it, not to put our own stamp on it. That's also why we're not limiting this to leather: any workshop making genuinely serious work for people who care about craft, leather or otherwise, fits here.
If you're curious about a specific piece or an atelier, get in touch. We read every message. If you run a workshop yourself, here's how a partnership works.