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Leather is fundamental to every pair of Celeris boots. It determines not only how a boot looks, but how it feels, how quickly it breaks in, how it performs and ultimately how it ages.
We offer an extensive collection of colours, finishes and textures, from beautifully soft matte calf leathers to hand-polished finishes, gloss leathers and specialist embossed and coated leathers. Every leather is carefully curated to meet our exacting quality requirements — we simply never take shortcuts with leather selection. While almost any of these can be used to create an entire boot, that does not necessarily mean they should be.
For the main construction of a riding boot, our recommendation will almost always be a high-quality matte leather, with more specialist finishes used as contrasts and design details. It offers the best combination of suppleness, durability, practicality and the ability to be maintained over many years.
That said, Celeris is about choice. Clients notoriously 'ignore' our sensible advice and create entire boots in the most extraordinary leathers available — and we rather love them for it. We simply believe you should understand the characteristics of the leather you choose before we make them.
Matte leather
For an everyday riding boot, matte leather remains our first choice.
It is supple, practical and comparatively forgiving. Minor scuffs and scratches can usually be polished and conditioned, and a beautiful shine can be built gradually using traditional boot polish. After all, before highly finished leathers existed, the immaculate shine associated with traditional riding and military boots was created by hand.
Matte leather also allows the boot to soften and mould naturally with wear, making it particularly suitable for models where flexibility and comfort are important.
If longevity and practicality are your priorities, matte leather is difficult to beat.
POLISHED & HAND-POLISHED LEATHERS
Our polished and hand-polished leathers give a richer finish from the outset and create wonderful depth of colour. For this reason the hand-polished black is our best selling leather year on year.
They sit between traditional matte leather and our highest-gloss finishes, making them an attractive choice for riders who want something more distinctive without committing to a full gloss boot. There is, however, a trade-off. These finishes can be firmer initially and therefore may extend the breaking-in period of your boots. Scratches can also be considerably more difficult to disguise than on matte leather because you cannot simply polish the original finish back into the leather. And yes, this is where the black nail varnish occasionally comes out. A scratch can mark the surface finish rather than simply scuffing polish and, once damaged, there may be no invisible way of repairing it.
They are beautiful. They are simply less forgiving.
GLOSS & SPECIALITY LEATHERS
There is nothing quite like them. And despite everything we are about to say, these are still exceptional-quality leathers which, when used and cared for sensibly, can perform beautifully for many years.
Our gloss, faux croc, embossed and other speciality finishes can transform a pair of boots, which is exactly why we use them so extensively within our designs.
But extraordinary finishes require a little more consideration. Our first piece of advice? Perhaps don't choose the muddiest day of the year to debut them. Speciality coated leathers cannot generally be restored in the same way as traditional matte leather, which makes scratches and marks potentially more noticeable.
For this reason, we particularly love speciality leathers on tops, piping, trims and other contrasting areas. You get all of their visual impact while the principal high-wear areas of the boot remain in a more practical leather. Some clients nevertheless want the entire boot in gloss, croc or another specialist finish. We will create it — but with the understanding that choosing a more delicate leather for high-wear areas inevitably carries a greater risk of visible marking. The more extraordinary the leather, generally the more carefully it needs to be treated.
SUEDE LEATHER
Suede is one of the softest leathers in our collection and creates an entirely different look and feel. Our suede is a beautifully substantial, high-quality leather rather than a delicate fashion suede. It offers wonderful softness and flexibility and is naturally a favourite with clients looking for a boot that feels less structured.
It is also more practical than its luxurious appearance might suggest. Our suede has good resistance to water, but—as with any suede riding boot—how it is worn and cared for matters. We recommend applying a quality suede protector regularly and being sensible about the conditions in which you wear it. Look after suede properly and there is no reason it cannot remain beautiful for years.
LEATHER, LONGEVITY & THE BEAUTY OF AGEING
One of the great advantages of genuine leather is that it is not expected to remain visually unchanged. Good leather develops character. It softens, moulds and develops a patina through use. It can be cleaned, conditioned, polished and cared for repeatedly throughout its life. A properly maintained pair of quality leather riding boots is designed to be worn for years, not discarded because the surface has acquired the evidence of being worn. That longevity is an important part of how we think about sustainability at Celeris.
COLOUR & NATURAL VARIATION
Leather is a natural material and that is part of its beauty.
We make every effort to ensure the colour you receive is the shade you are expecting, but natural leather will always carry some inherent variation. Our leathers are coloured using pigments, and slight variations in shade can occur from one hide or production batch to another. In most cases these differences are extremely subtle and should not be noticeably different, but absolute colour uniformity cannot be guaranteed in the same way it can with a completely synthetic material. It is one of the characteristics of working with a natural material rather than a manufactured imitation of one.
LEATHER vs “VEGAN LEATHER”
The term vegan leather can sound inherently environmentally preferable. The reality is considerably more complicated.
Many conventional synthetic alternatives marketed as vegan leather are made wholly or partly from plastics such as polyurethane (PU) or PVC, generally derived from fossil-fuel-based materials. Unlike genuine leather, these materials do not necessarily develop, recover or respond to conditioning and polishing in the same way, and once a synthetic surface begins to peel, crack or delaminate, repair can be difficult or impossible.
There are newer plant-derived, bio-based and lower-plastic alternatives being developed, and vegan leather now covers a broad range of materials, so it would be misleading to suggest that every alternative is simply plastic. Equally, genuine leather has its own environmental footprint, including livestock agriculture and the resources involved in tanning and production.
For us, sustainability is therefore not about attaching a fashionable label to a material. It is about quality, responsible production, performance and longevity. We have explored non-leather alternatives extensively, but to date we have not found a material that we believe can genuinely replicate the performance, durability, flexibility and longevity required for the main construction of a riding boot. We do, however, offer a vegan option for the inside grip panel of our boots. Importantly to us, this material is primarily made from rubber-based components rather than conventional plastic-based synthetic leather. It provides the grip and performance required for this particular area of the boot without compromising the qualities we expect from a Celeris product.
For now, we choose genuine leather because it provides the performance required from a riding boot while allowing us to create a product that can be maintained, repaired and worn for many years. A boot that lasts is fundamentally different from one designed around short-term consumption.
We will continue to research and explore alternatives, but until a genuinely plastic-free material is developed that performs to the standards required of a riding boot and offers genuine longevity, we will not use it for the main construction of our boots.
OUR ADVICE
If you ask us to design the most practical Celeris boot possible, we will probably suggest a beautiful matte leather for the main body and reserve our more spectacular leathers for carefully chosen details.
If you tell us you want head-to-toe gloss faux crocodile instead?
We will probably remind you about scratches.
And then we'll make you an extraordinary pair of boots.
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