Bycast belts are like pasta with tomato sauce

I know that the memories of travels are slowly fading in our memory, but if we concentrate a little we can still relive them in our mind.

The arrival at the airport, the tedious check-in procedures, the hope that the passenger in front of us is not too noisy or does not travel with a one-year-old child ready to break your eardrums as soon as the plane takes off ... in short, the journey it's not always a pleasure, but when you arrive at your destination everything changes.

You have time to dedicate to yourself, to those you love and you have time to discover new places, new cultures and new foods.

But if you are like 44% of Italians during your vacation you will find yourself eating an Italian dish or eating in a tricolor restaurant.

Do you know the most chosen dishes by Italians abroad? Pizza and Pasta above all, and it is precisely on the last one that I want to focus.

Let's try a little test: how many times abroad have you found a pasta with tomato sauce that could stand up to the one your grandmother used to cook you as a child?

Or did it resemble the one proposed by Martha Stewart, a well-known American presenter?

At this point, if you haven't felt hungry yet, you've probably wondered why I brought up pasta with tomato sauce.

Soon said: pasta with tomato sauce is perhaps the simplest dish in Italian cuisine and the most imitated and eaten abroad; in the end it is about pasta and tomato, what's difficult?

Well, if you've ever tasted it abroad, you know it's not as simple as it seems, and that's because simple things aren't easy at all.

And thinking about my sector, leather goods, the simplest belt there is is the bycast one.

In fact, bycast is that leather, mainly split, on which a polyurethane patina is applied that uniforms the material and makes it so perfect for making classic men's belts that it is used really everywhere, you can find it in all clothing stores, in all shoe stores, in all large distributions, in all large chain stores and this makes it the most fucked-up product and the least differentiated product of all because each belt looks the same as the other.

So, if each belt in bycast is the same as the other, do you need me as a made in Italy belt producer?

If you are only looking for an aesthetic appearance, a belt that is classic only to see and to sell below cost, I will free you immediately: I'm not the one for you. There are many suppliers both in Italy and abroad who can give you what you are looking for, thanks also to ways that are not always legal.

But what you will have in the end is a seemingly beautiful belt, which brings you sales, but which will damage your image. What seemed like a good deal, a way to increase your sales, will turn against you.

The reason? Because as for pasta with tomato sauce, also for bycast belts we can say that simple things are not necessarily easy.

Let's start with the raw material, leather: in South East Asia or in the low-cost leather goods industries, bycast is used, made from many small handkerchiefs and leather scraps, which otherwise would be thrown away, which are then joined together like a patchwork or a puzzle, to then be shaved and laminated exactly like the Italian ones.

The choice of this material then has repercussions on the tightness of the belt: by interrupting the fibers, the resistance is very very low and the belt will break faster and more easily.

For this reason, I choose to work only and exclusively with whole hide, usually butts: being a single piece of leather, resistance and tightness are very high and the belt becomes practically indestructible.

The only way to understand a priori the difference between the two materials is by looking at the back of thr leather, the raw material: the one that comes from South East Asia looks like a puzzle, with all the pieces of leather attached to each other, while the one I use is uninterrupted, a single block.

Another big difference is in the linings: do you know when your belt starts to crumble from the inside? First with a few small cuts and then a deluge of leather confetti like at Venice Carnival. In that case a Chinese lining has been used used; abroad, or rather in South East Asia, they use very thin linings, like an onion peel, which have absolutely no resistance. To give it a little more structure and reinforce them, they put inside some regenerated leather or cardboard ... but you too understand that a belt like this will never last.

On the other hand, even when I use splits as linings, I always choose them with a certain thickness and a certain resistance to be sure to give my client the guarantee that the belts will practically never break. More than once then I used full grain linings, such as full nubuck, to make a bycast belt, because the identity of the brand and its price range required it.

There are therefore visible details in the raw materials, in the accessories such as the metallics and the buckles that determine the quality level of the belt, but also in the manufacturing, in the camber, in the coloring of the edge and in the quality of the stitching that bring out clearly the superiority of Italian workmanship, especially if you compare the belts closely.

But especially like tomato pasta, one Italian and one Chinese, you realize what Italian tomato pasta is when you taste it, when you try it, and so you notice the quality of a classic men's belt in bycast when you wear an Italian one and you wear it over time compared to when you wear a low-quality belt that lasts very little.

Together we can create practically indestructible belts regardless of the level of your brand: we will take into consideration only excellent Italian raw materials and then, depending on the price range, we will work on the accessories, on the workmanship, on the linings to ensure that you can offer your customer only and exclusively products that can be guaranteed and of excellent quality, where by quality I mean raw materials, durability, aesthetics and a completely different working system compared to that of the Far East: speed in deliveries, lower minimum quantities. Moreover, the most important thing you need to know is that Italian bycast belts can also be cheap: as I mentioned earlier, we will work together based on your price range to create quality belts that can be guaranteed and that you can safely sell to your customers, having workable prices.

What other reasons do you have for keeping those nasty bycast belts made in “who knows where” in stock, which are most likely full of poisons and destroy the second time they are worn?

Know that bycast is the perfect material for making classic belts also because it is very ductile and you can choose the material with the effect that best suits the identity of your brand and why not, which also matches shoes and bags that you already propose: more opaque material, shinier, with a more pronounced grain, with a finer grain, with prints such as saffiano, tejus or cocco even carbon.

So, returning to the question I asked you at the beginning, do you really need me as a producer to make bycast belts?

You have to tell me the answer, depending on what you want to offer your customer and the image and prestige you want attributed to your brand.

As always, for any questions or curiosities write me on Whatsapp!

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