I give a lot of advice to clients on how to improve their ecommerce sites. I give them tips from my experience about “live” shopping carts, simplified checkout processes, and funneling customers. But every now and again I see a site that defies the rules. Some websites offer such great products for the right people, that there is no need to mess with it. One of these sites is Saddleback Leather.

I have been doing more international traveling lately, and I have been keeping my eye out for a good bag. I of course travel with my MacBook Pro everywhere I go, so it needed to accommodate that. But I also wanted something that would function as a bag for walking around foreign cities without my laptop. Something I could keep my camera, map and guide, and souvenirs in. After looking around for months, I didn’t really see anything that caught my eye. That is until I came across the Saddleback Leather site, and their incredible bags.

Before going into why I think the site is so great, let me share a little about why I think their product is so great.

First off, it looks like something Indiana Jones would be carrying around. I’m not saying I’m going to be stealing anything more than hotel robes on my travels, but it looks like something that could handle a stolen golden idol if I needed. And because it’s a nice tough leather, it (like me) gets cooler looking with age.

Second, it’s truly indestructible. The bag is made of full-grain leather, has no zippers to break and no buttons to fall off. It uses just solid metal buckles to secure it, and incredible thick synthetic string to hold it together. There are even rivets in key places to help make the bag more sturdy.

Third, this bag is just full of small little touches that make a lot of sense. For example, the strap is made with a piece of nylon in between the leather. This is done because leather stretches, but nylon doesn’t. So, your strap won’t get stretched to the point of breaking. Another great detail is that there is a solid piece of metal connecting the handle to the bag. This is so that the bag doesn’t begin to stretch out of place when you carry it. These are just a couple examples of the type of detail that went into this bag.

Now on to the website. First off I will say that the site may not look overly sophisticated, and that’s because it’s not. The code was obviously done in a WYSIWG tool. But the site is nice enough looking, and fairly easy to navigate around. Saddleback Leather has put together a great collection of pictures and stories about the bag. These include pictures of the bag from all over the world. Many featuring the owner Dave, but many from happy customers. Some of the more compelling letters shared from the site were from people ordering new bags. Not because their old ones gave out, but because they loved the bags so much.

And the pictures are great. Reporters in Iraq clutching their Saddleback briefcase, a man letting an elephant step on it, Dave shark diving in Bora Bora, and even a shot of the bag being held in the mouth of a velociraptor in Costa Rica.

I’m not normally someone who suggests a lot of long text content on ecommerece site. I like bullet points, quick calls to action, and a lot of signs pointing to the checkout. But as I said, this site defies my closed box logic, and does so with it’s own style. I found the content incredibly compelling and I was riveted. I was sending the site to friends who didn’t quite get into it as much as I, likely because they were not looking for a new briefcase.

The content was interesting and made you believe that simply having this bag would lead to adventures. But the hype was all internal. The best thing about the sites content is that it seems very sincere. In the end the site’s content really tells the story about how a guy (and his dog) set out to make a great bag for people like himself that travel and want a bag that is going to last longer than themselves.

Obviously in order to create this type of content, you need to both truly believe in your product, and understand your customer. Dave has done both of these things masterfully.

As for suggestions for Saddleback Leather, I would only have a couple. First, spend some time optimizing the site for search. I think the site has some great content that people may be compelled to link to. Optimizing the titles alone would give the site a bit of traction in the search engines. Maybe go for the term, custom leather briefcase.

My second suggestion is to get this bag out there more. Send a bag to Tim Ferriss, or Mat Harding with a letter explaining why the bag is so great. I’m sure once they use it they will become evangelist and spread the word, which they can do to a lot people very quickly.

I should mention that I did of course purchase an extra large bag from Saddleback Leather, and I am extremely happy with it. Not only does it feel great, but it gets almost as many comments as my iPhone did. On my last trip to San Francisco I had to write down the name of the website for three different strangers who loved the bag and asked me where they could get one. And to top it all off, it fits my MacBook Pro like a glove. I use the Booq Bag Sleeve for a little extra protection (this isn’t a laptop bag), and it works wonderfully.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 2nd, 2007 at 4:35 pmand is filed under Site Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.