By Claire Williams
Down a small dirt road lined with fields of horses and bright yellow wildflowers, Don Gonzales, owner of Don Gonzales Saddlery, is hard at work carving intricate patterns into pieces of leather.
It all began back in the eighth grade. Gonzales’ best friend’s father had a career in leatherwork, which inspired Gonzales to try it out for himself. As the son of an artistic mother, Gonzales always had a knack for various forms of art, and leatherwork was no different.
Fast forward about five years to Gonzales’ days as a student at Texas A&M University. “My friend asked me to make a leather knife sheath for him,” Gonzales says. When he went to deliver it, another friend saw it and asked how much he charged. Gonzales jokingly replied $30, but before he could laugh it off, the friend whipped out his wallet and requested a custom order.
“From then on, I always kept a small space for a workbench in my apartment to do small orders on the side,” Gonzales says.
Apart from this side hobby, Gonzales was not studying any art subjects in school. Instead, he graduated with a degree in science and applied to veterinary school.
As he waited on an acceptance to vet school, Gonzales befriended Jim Plant, who owned a local saddlery. Plant offered an apprenticeship for building saddles to Gonzales, and by 2002 he had built his first saddle. Gonzales soon found out he was not admitted into vet school, and looking back, it all worked out for the better. Gonzales began doing work orders for Plant’s shop over the next couple of years, until Plant offered to sell the shop to him, which he bought and made his own.
Currently, the waitlist for a custom saddle is about a year long because of the intricate process. Each saddle takes anywhere from 40 to 130 hours to complete, Gonzales says. There are additional factors that can increase the production period. Gonzales orders the wooden bases for his saddles from a local wood shop. The leather he uses originates from Hermann Oak Leather Company, based in St. Louis, which is one of the oldest tanneries in the United States.
A majority of Gonzales’ orders are custom saddle requests, followed by custom belts. Customers typically come in with an idea, pictures, and their key hopes for the outcome, Gonzales says.
“Sometimes I just have to pray that what’s in my head matches up with what’s in the customer’s head,” Gonzales says. “It usually does, though.”
Gonzales likes to keep the customer involved in the process, typically sending photos of the progress along the way to make sure they are happy with how it’s developing.
While Gonzales uses his talent for his business, he does not want to keep all of his knowledge and gifts to himself. He runs a blog and YouTube channel, where he leads detailed, step-by-step instructions on how to improve leather skills, how to tool, and how to make full projects from start to finish. He received a positive response on a recent project video — how to make a small leather purse. He includes PDFs of the designs and patterns, making it simple for both amateur and advanced craftsmen to create their own leather projects. Although Gonzales has worked in several different shops over the years, he hopes to soon have a permanent shop on his own property. Some of his other goals for the future consist of making his own wooden saddle bases, teaching a full tutorial on building a saddle, providing online courses, and hosting more in-person workshops.
“My style is always evolving,” Gonzales says. “I do have some customers who have been doing business with me long enough and know I’ll build what they want. That makes it nice because I get to experiment with what I want something to look like, which I hardly ever get to do. That makes it fun.”
