An Elephant, small enough to hold in one hand.
The Elly is our Heritage
The Elly Came First.
The house is new. The Elly is not.
We made the first ones years ago, under a name we no longer trade under: Evergotten. That heritage is now carried in the name of our lambskin, Evergotten Lambskin. They were bought and carried by people who knew leather, in places we did not expect. Some are still in use.
When we returned, we returned to this object first. The lambskin still carries the old name. Evergotten is the one thing we kept.
The First Elly, Made in 2016
An Elephant as a Bag Charm.
The Elly is cut from the softest leather we make: a French lambskin, dyed all the way through and left uncoated, so what you touch is the leather itself and nothing laid over it.
It is light. It warms in the hand and gives under the thumb. A small object made to be carried and held rather than looked at.
How we bring each Elly to life.
We make every Elly by hand.
It is made in lambskin. Each part is cut individually and precisely. Every stitch hole is made by hand, one at a time, and every stitch sewn the same way. The ears are saddle stitched. The strap is left clean, set with a permanent glue rather than a seam. The edges are not finished, only cut clean. The edition number and the house mark are hot stamped into the underside of each ear, out of sight.
We make the Elly in the tradition of the small leather animals that came before. Not in place of them. Ours is an elephant.
Colour Card
Evergotten Lambskin
Named after the brand before Zanzzoa, Evergotten, under which we produed the first Elly bag charms in 2016. This French lambskin, originating from a historic French specialist in lambskins, is very soft and extremely supple to the touch with a light sheen and smooth finish. The skins are dyed all the way through and takes on colours immaculately..
Dusty Pink
Buttercup
Bubble Blue
Duck Egg
Elephant
Black
Why An Elephant?
We could have made any animal. We made an elephant.
Elephant herds are led by their mothers. The group is female and stays together around them. Most of the people who carry an Elly are women.
The elephant is the animal we associate with memory. This is a house built on memory: a number under every piece, a certificate, a book that records everyone who has owned one.
It is also the largest animal that walks, and among the gentlest. Strength carried quietly is the temperament of everything we make.
There is a closer reason. We are Indian, and where we come from the elephant is auspicious: the figure you turn to at the start of something, to clear the way in front of it. It was the right thing to make first.
Numbered and Recorded.
Every Elly is marked: Zanzzoa, Made in England, and its number.
We make them in seventeens. The number is not arbitrary: the co-founder, craftswoman, was born on the seventeenth, and every batch holds to it exactly. The founding seventeen are numbered by hand, A0·01 through A0·17. A0 marks the origin; every batch after carries only its own label.
The founding seventeen each leave with a certificate, and every owner's name is entered in the register, the bound book that holds the whole house. Only the house holds the book. It is how you will know, in ten years, exactly what you have.
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