Our story
Marta and Tommaso, since 2012.
The name
Behind the name El Mato there are MArta and TOmmaso.
And the fact that mato sounds a lot like matto — mad, in Italian — is not just a coincidence: mad enough to choose a craft instead of looking for a steady job.
The mask
The mask comes from one idea: look at the piece, not at who made it. It moves your attention away from the brand and the glitter, and onto the materials and the finishing.
How we started
Right after our degrees — Marta in food science and technology, Tommaso in philosophy — we fell for leather and the way it is worked, above all through Dodo, a craftsman from Cremona, our home town, now retired.
He first drew us in and then taught us about this material, and above all about what it means to be a craftsman: to work slowly, with care and precision, against the grain of today’s market and its rules.
From Cremona to Desenzano
In 2014 we opened in Cremona: a small workshop and a shop with no windows. In 2018 we moved to Desenzano del Garda. The dream was the mountains, but while we were looking for a house and a workshop up there we found this place on the lake, and it felt like the right middle ground between work and quality of life.
Now there are two windows, one facing the other, and the workshop is behind them. You can visit: whoever comes in sees the sewing machines, the benches and the creative mess of people who work with their hands.
A walk between the benches →Who does what
We both know how to do everything. We cut, we sew and we glue, but each of us is made differently.
Marta is the more creative one. She imagines the bag from her mood, or from the occasion she would like to carry it to; her feminine touch is essential.
Tommaso is the more practical one. He brings it down to earth, counts the hours and the materials, studies where it could fail and where it is strong, and then works out how to sell it.
The machines are older than we are
They arrived slowly, second-hand, one a year, after working in other workshops under who knows how many expert hands. They are all mechanical, with little or no electronics: when they break you change a part and off they go again.
It is the same reason a bag of ours can still be repaired ten years from now. It was made to last, to be used, and to follow the life of whoever owns it.