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Vintage Leather Pen Case II (Gusti Leather): A Review

This post is what is the third part of a series on pencil cases from German leather distributor Gusti Leather. The first part of this little series was in German and on pen rolls. The second post was on a brown vintage leather pen case – the little sister of this pen case here, so to speak. Hence, this post here and the last review overlap quite a lot. I originally intended to write this post in Swedish (I do live in Stockholm), but dropped that idea since I switched the Blog to mainly English now.

Having that said, the product that I’d like to take a closer look at here is a Vintage Leather Pencil Case – I got the black one, but it’s also available in brown. Costing about 18€, it is – just as most of the Gusti Leather products –  pretty decently priced.

Let’s go ahead and dive straight into things.

Vintage Leather Pen Case II (Gusti Leather)

The Vintage Leather Pencil Case is part of the Gusti Leder studio-series which, according to the company, “stands for practicality and transparency”. Since the products are often handmade in lower income-countries, this includes

  • making sure that employees are living comfortably and are working in good and suitable conditions
  • visiting producers severally per annum to maintain a close relationship
  • putting measures in place that ban child labour.

This black Vintage Leather Pencil case I got here, for instance, is made by a slightly larger producer (meaning 50-200 employees) in India. It’s made from buffalo hide and chemically tanned.

Vintage Leather Pen Case II (Gusti Leather)

The black leather has a pretty light structure and the stitchings used are beautiful. The workmanship is excellent and would you tell me it is machine-made, I would probably believe it. I do also love the way it feels in the hands – smooth, soft and handy at the same time. It has the “Gusti Leder studio”-logo embossed on the frontside.

As with its tinier brown counterpart, what I personally love most about that case is its minimalist and elegant look that is somehow vintage at the same time. For me, this is achieved through the simple lines and rounded edges, while this character is sort of amplified by the color of the leather. When you look at the pen case in brown, you will see a clear difference in the character of the case, just by a change of the color. While the brown leans much more to the vintage-elegant side, the black here to me personally clearly tends towards the classy-elegant side.

Vintage Leather Pen Case II (Gusti Leather)

This is what the frontside looks like once the case is taken apart. Both parts are still really sturdy – you can press on them pretty hard and they won’t indent dramatically. The whole thing feels really stable and you’ll definitely trust it to protect your pens well.

The pen case is slightly larger in size, measuring 17 x 8 x 4,5 cm (WxHxD). The basic mechanism of the case is that of a slider, i.e. it consists of a tube and a slide-on that sort of serves as a shell.

Vintage Leather Pen Case II (Gusti Leather)

Upon turning the parts around, you’ll be able to see more of the stitching and the way the leather hide as been put on the shells. The shell on the right hand side, which is the one that’s going to carry the pens, has sort of a felt-coating inside that is very soft but pretty grippy, thus preventing pens from sliding out all too easily upon opening the case.

So let’s now put the case to test a bit and fill it up with some pens. I do normally also carry page markers, paper and file clips as well as other small stuff such as erasers and sharpeners with me, but I do honestly think that while you could potentially also fit them into that case right here, this is not really what it is most suitable for. I think this really is rather a pen and pencil case.

Vintage Leather Pen Case II (Gusti Leather)

So as you can see on that filling here, the pencil case takes up quite an amount of writing instruments. Its little brother has less volume. There is no problem in adding highlighters or more bulky pens – still plenty of space.

As with the brown case, I would and do use this case for rather inexpensive or very sturdy pens only. I do have other cases for carrying my more expensive pens. This is since the pens, of course, do constantly grind on each other in this pencil case here. For the more standard pens this is perfectly okay, though.

Vintage Leather Pen Case II (Gusti Leather)

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