Luggage company puts heart into its handmade bags
San Antonio-based firm catering to U.S. markets expands as demand for its more than 100 products grows
Inside Jon Hart Design’s spacious building near downtown, dozens of seamstresses hunch over sewing machines, feeding fabric to hungry needles.
A man watches laser machines etch logos onto thin strips of leather while another scans a hide for defects, carefully outlining a mark that will need to be cut out. A worker stamps customers’ names in shiny gold foil as machines hum, whir and buzz, slicing hides into myriad parts.
Everywhere people are moving: snipping off wayward threads, gathering scraps and kitting together backpacks, duffel bags and totes forming a rainbow splayed across tables and shelves.
“It’s like a puzzle,” said Marc Almodovar, director of research and development at Jon Hart.
For 45 years, the company has been making luggage, handbags and accessories the same way: by hand in Texas. Jon Hart was founded by Don Snell, an actor, writer, singer and producer who was born in Houston but grew up in San Antonio. Snell was living in Houston in the 1970s and managing his own awning and tent store when he decided to start making a luggage line. Skills he learned in costume design classes at Trinity University in San Antonio were a help.
The Jon Hart name came from a variation of the spelling of Snell’s heart-shaped key chain, Hart, and his first name. “Don” didn’t fit and Snell changed it to Jon. The company moved from Houston to Dallas and later to San Antonio after Snell sold it in the late 1980s. Snell died in 2006.
Today, Jon Hart makes more than 100 different products and sells to roughly 600 retailers, many of them boutiques in the Southwest. Prices range from less than $50 to several hundred dollars per piece, depending on the item.
Among the company’s 115 employees, 100 of them work in manufacturing, and Jon Hart is expanding quickly to keep up with demand. Sales have grown by up to 30 percent in recent years, said Sharon Durham, head of marketing and sales. The company recently invested in new machinery aimed at increasing efficiency. Last year, they moved across Burleson, near the Hays Street Bridge, into facilities triple the size of their previous operations.
“We were thousands of orders behind” when the company moved, Almodovar said. “Sales are growing, and we had to play catch-up.”
This summer, they added a second shift. The company is currently looking to hire another 20 people. They use agencies, social media and a large sign posted on the facility to recruit workers, but finding seamstresses is difficult, Durham said. Sewing is a lost art of sorts, she said.
Most of the materials are sourced domestically, and the company takes pride in the fact that they’ve always made their products in the U.S., said Almodovar.
“We’re never going overseas,” he said.
While it’s a selling point for some customers, homegrown manufacturing also makes it easier to prototype and test new products and ensure quality, Almodovar said. He can design a new bag, walk downstairs to the factory floor and start testing it immediately without having to wait on shipping times. Almodovar, who spent 17 years at Levi Strauss, has introduced nearly 40 new products over the last three years and is working on several more, including a new style of luggage.
When the North East Independent School District instituted a policy this year requiring students’ backpacks to be transparent, the phones at Jon Hart started ringing off the hook. The company was able to design and produce a clear backpack quickly, Almodovar said. Clear bags people can take into stadiums, concerts and airplanes are some of Jon Hart’s most popular products.
The company is also proud of its simple, timeless designs, Almodovar said. Customers who bought bags decades ago have brought them back to the San Antonio facility for repairs and the company does their best to fix the items, he said. Some styles are no longer made, and Almodovar has to flip through his book of archives to find them.
“For many people, there’s a story behind it,” he said. “It has a history.”