I love the look and feel of real leather. When it comes to shopping for bags or shoes, I won’t compromise on material or quality. It has to be leather and it has to be top quality leather. I’ve made mistakes over the years and bought some real duds. I offer a few handy tips so that you can avoid the mistakes I’ve made.

There are four grades of leather that are commercially available: Full Grain, Top Grain, Split Grain, and Bonded Leather. The first one, Full Grain is the best. With proper care a full grain bag will last a lifetime. Keep it clean and give it some TLC a couple of times a year and it will be a bag you could pass on to your daughter like an heirloom. You can remember it this way: they used a full cow to get that piece of leather!

Top grain is the next highest quality. It’s pretty good, but there are imperfections in the hide and they’ve had to do some sanding to smooth out problems and probably had to do some dyeing to remove (or lessen) color imperfections. Not a bad buy overall, but the manipulations done before the leather became a bag will weaken the bag’s strength.

Split grain is the next grade on the scale. As the name implies this leather has been separated. Generally split grain leather becomes suede. There’s nothing wrong with suede, but it is not a long-lasting material. For a bag, I would avoid suede. It just can’t stand up to the rigors of everyday use.

The cheapest bags on the market are made from bonded leather. Again, as the name implies, pieces of leather are chemically bonded together to create a single piece of material. The pieces were likely scraps or inferior hides to begin with and now you have a bag made out of pieces of poor leather. How is that going to go, I wonder?

The biggest mistake I see when I’m out shopping is that people assume  and it is understandable that top grain is the highest quality leather. I have seen big-name designers put hefty price tags on top grain leather products. As the old saying goes, “Let the buyer beware.”