It’s The Official Blog

  • How To Distinguish Leather Straps

    A fun 1980’s themed how-to guide video series for HELDgear.com.

    This video goes into inferior leather products, including fake leather that is designed to trick the customer who is enticed by an impossibly low price tag, or the vegan who doesn’t account for labor conditions.

    HELD straps are a repurposed industrial material sourced from domestic factories. They are built to work, whereas most leather and vegan belts such as “PU Leather” are built to look good but rapidly decay, buckles break, contributing to waste, pollution, and exploitive labor, as they are rarely sourced from American manufacturers.

    The leather industry has papered over the inferiority of their product with jargon. For example “top grain” leather is actually below the top surface, under the most durable layer of cow hide.

    What is called “genuine” is not what most people believe it is. At best, there is a cosmetic layer of pure leather glued on top of particulate matter. At worst, it is ground up leather mixed with filler, bonded with toxic glues.

    In some cases, a genuine leather product is recycled, derived from used or scrap waste, but any business claiming this should always be vetted for their sourcing and labor practices.

    HELD straps are vulcanized sheets of fabric: cotton, polyester, nylon, or a blend. This involves tree-derived rubbers heated and cooled to fully embed the fabric sheets. The result is one fully formed material built for high stress conditions.

    Industrial strength fabric is embedded within the rubber, similar to bicycle tires, and the composite product is immensely stronger than one or the other alone. It is excellent for hanging tools, rock climbing gear, and other auxiliaries.

    One reason for the lack of raw hide leather in department stores is that many cows sustain all kinds of skin infections, from insect bites to disease. This leaves porous, unattractive mars on the surface of the leather. Raw hide leather is extremely durable, but if it comes from an abused cow, the actual surface of the hide is discarded and likely ground up for genuine leather products. This denotes a problem with animal exploitation in agriculture.

    Pure raw hide leather straps from free range cows are difficult to find and very expensive. Top grain is the solution for leather fabricators who need a product they can sell that will last a few solid years. No good for vegans, however, and HELD is here to offer products for everyone.

    The manufacturers we buy from pay living wages to workers. The HELD belt is a fractional runoff from a massive industry in which thousands of feet of conveyor belting is produced every day.

    That we source a portion of our straps from unused production ends helps with industrial waste solutions. Weighed against manufacturing processes in the textile industry, and short life of inferior products, every Held belt around someone’s waist reduces at least two more units in the landfill from an inferior product.

    When a Held belt becomes undesirable cosmetically, the strap can be repurposed in whole, as in belting a bed roll or something like that, or in parts, like hinges on a trunk or to hang a sign.

    We hope this video helps you understand what you’re buying before you buy it, whether or not you choose HELD.

    Photo of discarded leather by Mark Ahsmann.

  • Bitcoin and Crypto Payments Now Available

    Durability is one of the pillars of the Held brand. Cryptocurrencies are a new frontier that people can use toward a more durable future. Coinbase is an American publicly traded company that provides the most trustworthy solution for a range of crypto payments.

    As of now, none of the online retailers that we have stores with offer a cryptocurrency payment solution.

    Held Gear dot com is hosted by a small Oregon-based company with longstanding values in security and privacy. This website is powered by open source and free software including WooCommerce and Coinbase Commerce. These systems provide all the solutions Held needs for the scaled growth of the brand, without compromising the privacy and security of its customers.

    Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ethereum, Shiba Inu, and many more units are accepted at checkout. Just shop and before using fiat, select the crypto payment box and use your CoinBase account to complete the order. Please contact if you have any questions.

  • Fashion Show Friday!

    Fashion Show Friday!

    For the first time in many years, Held Gear is participating in a fashion show. This August 12, we will be combining forces with two artists to show the range of styles that these products coordinate with.

    Leaning toward the hip hop and street clothes fashion, we’re working with Bullshitforsale. The brand is humorous, the name is tongue and cheek. He cuts up thrift shop scores into complete one-of-a-kind pieces, and our Mammoth and Snow Ermine straps will cut through the mosaic styles he crafts.

    Swinging toward goth and punk with a twist of dark magic, Cult Ties will be presenting one ensemble and is modeling the black strap known as “classic.” She produces hand knit apparel and more crafts.

    To be determined at rehearsal, other models will sport the Auroch and Summer Sky sets.

    Standardizing a belt, cuff, and collar set for every primary Held strap, while showing them in a runway setting is a milestone for this brand. The sets have always been there, but presented like an ensemble, it hasn’t been done yet.

    Micah and I were there in Portland, Oregon when it was young, gritty limitlessly creative, and I haven’t felt that energy for over a decade, until now in Philadelphia. Held Gear is lucky to be here.

    The show is produced by Bigbootybotanist, a Temple University student making the most of her summer. It is her first fashion show but she is determined to keep on with event production.

    -Sean

  • New Products, Old Ideas Revised

    Clearance sales on Mammoth and Snow Ermine are in effect. This is to accelerate plans to improve those designs. In fact, Ermine is a new design based on a strap used in the past. The cut on this strap came out 1/16″ too wide, but it still fits through the buckle, just a little tight.

    Mammoth is our most expensive, chic, standard belt. Yet, it has the same design as the classic, with the roller buckle and single snap. We found a chic modern western style buckle for it. It requires a double snap and a slightly tighter loop to house the buckle, so all previously built Mammoths must go.

    The gradual rollout of Held’s mainstay catalogue has been going steadily.

    Any products listed at HeldGear.com are considered ongoing inventory with no discontinuation in sight. These are not recycled products and they are built from new components.

    Etsy will continue for now as the exclusive listing site for prototypes, limited issues, and units built from recycled materials.

    Held products reduce waste even when they are newly sourced, because they are the most durable belt strap outside of pure raw hide leather. “Genuine Leather” is nonsense. That stuff is either a composite of junk leather ground into particles, mixed with other junk, then bound together by toxic adhesives.

    Most people that buy a cheap standard black belt for their job don’t even realize that they are wearing a vegan belt. However, it is made from a weak strap, junk buckles, made in poor working conditions, and is not meant to last a year.

    Held offers an affordable alternative. Our retail prices are in the same range as inferior products at major department stores. We offer something that can be put to the test day in and out, for years to come.

    The goal of standardizing mainstay products with completely American-made components is within reach, and getting closer with every sale. As our supply chain works right now, we already support small American companies every step of the way.

    So many possibilities are at our fingertips springing from the belt design. The reversible snap strap allows for customization options like different buckles, and more conceptual designs and color combinations. Building that into the shop is a little complex, but it’s almost here.

    Cuffs, collars, and new belt designs are coming out right now.

    HELD is a supplement to the whole American manufacturing apparatus that uses conveyor belting in their process. We support the continued sales of these manufacturers even during a recession.

    We are also a punk rock company, man, this is all indie as it gets. That’s why, eventually people will say, we’re the only brand that matters.