Anyone who enters the term "school satchel" in the relevant Internet search engines and shopping portals will receive a flood of offers.

They range from relatively inexpensive backpacks for first graders to sophisticated brand-name products that can easily cost several hundred euros. They almost all have one thing in common: they are colorful, industrially manufactured and made of plastic. Only in exceptional cases are bags made of the material that was the predominant one until the seventies: leather.

But they still exist, the leather satchels. A small leather workshop at the Gänsmühle in Martinstein, Rhineland-Palatinate, produces them on customer request. However, the Schmelzer family's leather satchels differ from their classic brown ancestors not only in their color variety, but also in size and weight. After all, students today have to lug around half libraries and office equipment. So the satchels have to be spacious and light.

Lena Schmelzer, who is already the third generation to work in the leather workshop, shows us how a modern leather satchel is created step by step by hand, which can compete not only in design but also in price with industrial products made of plastic, but is more individual and sustainable and, in case of doubt, accompanies its owner for far longer than just a school career.