How Clever Supply Co. Found Its Soul in Leather, Photography, and Craft

Steven: So before we even get to Clever Supply, I want to hear about you as a photographer first. What were you up to before the brand existed?

Todd: It honestly starts with my grandfather. He was the family photographer; every gathering, Christmas, Easter, he was the guy with the camera. You just grew up expecting it. That was grandpa’s thing, you know? And somewhere around junior year of high school, I started thinking, “I want to do that.” I asked for a camera for my birthday, and ended up getting into digital just as it was starting to become a real thing—this would’ve been around 2004, 2005.

Here’s the funny part, though. My grandfather had just upgraded to a digital Canon Rebel and was selling off his old film camera, so I bought it from him. So I actually inherited his last film camera, and that became my thing. My high school had a film program, I got pulled into the darkroom world a little bit, and I just… I got hooked. It was a fun creative outlet and the interest never really went away. I was always interested in tech as well, and I was involved in a multimedia program at school, so I was also doing video work and learning Final Cut and all that stuff.

Fast forward a few years, I’d moved to Louisville for college and I was working at Apple, just a young adult trying to figure out what I was doing with my life. A friend of my wife’s was getting engaged and asked if I’d shoot their engagement photos, and then eventually their wedding. And that was kind of the beginning. I was just the guy who always had his camera, and once people saw the photos, they started asking me to shoot things for real. I figured, hey, at minimum I can pay for gear I want to buy. But then I did that first wedding and it was just, wow. The rush of being part of someone’s huge day. I totally fell in love with the idea of doing photography for a living.

Steven: How long did the photography business run?

Todd: I got really serious about it around 2010, 2011, and ran with it until about 2016. And it was always kind of a side thing, honestly. Not because I wanted it to be, but looking back, I just didn’t have the business chops yet to figure out how to make it fully sustainable. There were definitely seasons where it was a really important part of our income as a young family just getting started. But by year four I’d taken a job at a social media management company called Buffer, and I just made the call to shut the photography business down and walk away from it.

There was a mourning period in that, for sure. I didn’t feel like I failed, exactly, but a big part of my identity was wrapped up in being a creative, in chasing that thing. So I did what I always do when that happens: I found another hobby.

Steven: So how did leathercraft enter the picture?

Todd: My wife got me this really beautifully made leather wallet for Christmas. And I just… I couldn’t stop thinking about it. The quality of it, how it felt in your hands, the idea that this thing was just going to last forever. It genuinely did not leave my brain. Eventually I thought, okay, maybe I can figure out how to make something like this myself.

So I walked into a Tandy Leather store—think of it like Joann Fabrics but specifically for leathercraft—knowing absolutely nothing, and just asked someone behind the counter to point me in the right direction. Went home with some tools and a hide and just started messing around with it. Got completely hooked. There’s something about working with your hands that’s really grounding when you spend your whole day staring at a screen. I needed a break from screens. So I started making key clips, wallets, bags, whatever I could figure out how to do.

“I wanted to make sure I knew how to do something nice with leather before I touched a camera strap. It felt too sacred.”

It eventually pointed toward photography gear, but I didn’t rush into camera straps. I’d been at it for about a year before I even tried making one. There was something about it that felt almost too personal to get wrong. I can’t fully explain it, but I just really wanted to know what I was doing before I went there.

Eventually I made one and sent it to a couple of photographer friends. And the light bulb moment came when my friend Billy, the founder of State Film Lab, asked if I’d be interested in making a few for him to sell wholesale to his film clients. And I just remember thinking… wait, people might actually want to buy these? Like, what if photographers I really looked up to were wearing our straps? That whole idea just lit something up. I made them for Billy, they sold, and I was pretty much off to the races from there.

Steven: Clever Supply is celebrating its 10th year this year. Was there a specific moment where you knew this wasn’t just a hobby anymore?

Todd: It was a slow build that kind of suddenly became undeniable. In a weird way, we were actually a COVID success story. Around the five-year mark, early 2020, I made the decision to pull everything off my website that wasn’t camera-related. Wallets, belts, lifestyle stuff; all of it, gone. I was going to go all in on leather camera straps and nothing else. Really test that whole ‘niche down’ idea everyone talks about in marketing.

Around that same time, Benj Haisch, one of the first really influential voices who knew about our stuff, reached out about an affiliate thing and made a video about our straps. And almost at the exact same time, PetaPixel ran an article about us. Those two things together just changed everything. We went from maybe 30 orders in a month to 300 orders the following month. One month. My wife and I just looked at each other like, okay, we have to make a decision here. Either stop, because there’s no possible way I can support this on the side, or quit my day job and actually go for it.

We gave ourselves about a week and a half to really think it through, prayed on it, and just decided to take the leap. I figured that, worst case, I can find another job if it doesn’t work out. We haven’t really looked back since.

Steven: Did you bring on help pretty soon after going full-time?

Todd: Yeah, pretty quickly. A huge chunk of our production time goes into hand stitching, so I brought people in for that almost right away. They’d come by the house, grab a batch of straps, stitch them overnight, and drop them back off the next morning. That’s honestly how we scaled for a while. Once we got out of the garage and into a proper space with a real warehouse and production area, that’s when I started bringing on actual employees. We’ve got two full-time people now, and we bring in extra help seasonally when things really ramp up.

Steven: What’s a standard you’ve held onto as a brand that’s maybe cost you time or money, but you’d never give up?

Todd: We want it to be the best camera strap experience you’re going to have. Full stop. And for us, that means it has to look great and be made really well. Craftsmanship has to be baked into the identity of the brand. We want something you can hand down. Something that ends up in your grandkid’s attic one day and still works perfectly. That’s the bar.

That’s just not how the world makes things right now. Stuff from Amazon is built to be used for a year, maybe a couple more if you’re lucky, and then replaced. It’s not made to be passed on. So we source the best leather we can find, we stitch things the old-world way, and we spec hardware that we know is going to hold up over real, long-term use. We’re kind of overbuilding everything on purpose, and I’m totally fine with that.

Steven: What’s a misconception that you run into as a small business? Either about Clever Supply or just about what it takes to build a brand around physical, handmade goods?

Todd: A couple things come to mind. The first one is that people often assume we’re bigger than we are. It’s three people and some seasonal help—that’s really the whole operation. When someone reaches out on Instagram assuming they’re dealing with some big company, I kind of get it, because we put a lot of effort into how the brand looks and feels. But yeah, it really is just us.

The other big one is the speed thing. The tension between making something by hand and the pace people expect now is genuinely one of the hardest things to navigate. When I started Clever, two-day shipping felt impressive. Now Amazon can drop something on your doorstep in three hours. Literally. We still make everything by hand, but we’ve worked really hard to get our processes tight enough that we’re usually shipping the next day if we can. I never want to sacrifice quality for speed. But I also know that’s just the world we’re operating in now, so you have to figure out how to do both.

That’s also a big reason why we keep the lineup focused and don’t go crazy with customization options. Keeping things streamlined is what makes the speed possible. It’s an ongoing balancing act, honestly.

Steven: You’ve moved into bags over the last couple years. What drove that decision, and where do you see the product line going from here?

Todd: When I went full-time, the natural question became: okay, how do we keep serving photographers beyond just the straps? You only need so many of those, right? So I started looking at the bag market, and what I kept seeing was very sleek, futuristic design. Everything was very tech-forward and very modern. And there’s nothing wrong with that look, but I kept wondering why there wasn’t something with more soul? Leather, waxed canvas, that kind of Americana heritage vibe, but designed specifically for photographers and built around a modern sling silhouette.

The vision I kept coming back to was: what if Apple and Filson made a camera bag together? That was basically the mood board. And the sling has done really well. We just released a V2 that was almost entirely driven by customer feedback. Pretty much every change we made came directly from what people told us they wanted. Seeing customers who loved the first bag get genuinely excited about the improvements was really rewarding.

Bags are going to stay a core part of the lineup going forward. Beyond that, we’re really trying to stay focused on the idea of "carrying your camera.” Everything we make should feel like a daily companion that goes wherever you and your camera go.

Steven: Are there any collaborations you’re still hoping to pull off someday?

Todd: Okay, this is part joke and part completely serious: I want Spider-Man wearing our camera strap. Peter Parker. The moment I’m sitting on the couch watching that movie with my boys and Peter Parker’s got one of our straps on, I can retire. In my wildest imagination there’d never be an official Spider-Man collab, but come on, that would be unbelievable.

There’s actually a real story behind that, though. There’s a brand I follow called Rogue Territory; small, homegrown apparel operation. One of their signature jackets ended up in the last Daniel Craig Bond film, “No Time to Die.” Just knowing they’re a tiny shop and watching their product show up on a stage that big, that really stuck with me. It’s deeply inspiring to see something like that happen for a small maker.

More realistically, we’ve done some collaborations with Fujifilm, which was genuinely a pinch-yourself kind of moment. You spend years using a brand’s tools to make your work, and then they ask you to make something with their name on it? That means a lot. We’d love to do more with camera brands and with photographers whose work we really respect.

Steven: What’s a decision you made out of fear that you later had to fix or walk back?

Todd: The most relevant one is pretty recent. We use a factory in Vietnam to manufacture our bags. We design them here, but production happens there. When the trade war hit and tariffs took effect, the cost to import those goods was suddenly going to jump by at least 25 to 40% on top of what it already cost us to make them. Just like that.

And what that did to me, honestly, was cause complete paralysis. I was trying to be wise about it, waiting things out, hoping the situation would stabilize before I committed to a big purchase order. The problem is it didn’t stabilize; it just stayed hard. And while I was sitting there waiting, we were running low on V1 bags, the V2 was sitting there ready to go into production, and I kept pushing the order back. What should’ve gone in at the start of summer went in at the end of summer. We missed our fall 2025 launch, and missed the holiday season entirely. We’re fortunate that we’re fine, but it was a real missed opportunity, and yeah, that one still stings a little.

The thing I took away from it—and I genuinely don’t think I could have learned this without going through it—is how dangerous decision paralysis is. Waiting is a decision too, and sometimes it’s the wrong one. A lot of small founders and makers were in the exact same spot during that time. There’s no playbook for navigating a trade war when you’re a three-person shop. But if there’s ever a proper history of Clever Supply written someday, that’s going to be one of the chapters for sure. “Surviving a Trade War.”

Steven: Were there any skills or blind spots you had to really work on through building Clever Supply?

Todd: The one that comes to mind immediately is just actually showing up on camera. Not just posting product photos, but putting my face out there, talking to people, letting them see who’s behind the brand. Instagram has been a huge part of how we’ve built our audience, and it took me a while to really internalize that people don’t just want to see the product—they want to see the person making it.

I wasn’t camera-shy exactly, it just wasn’t something I was doing much. It always felt like one more thing on a very full plate. But I’m watching even big brands try to bring that human, founder-led element back into their marketing right now, because people can tell when something is genuine and when it isn’t. For us especially, putting my face on it reinforces the fact that we’re small, we care, and every single product that ships out has been touched by a real person. I’m not claiming to be great at it, but I’m showing up and putting in the reps.

Steven: Ten years in. What does the next ten look like for you?

Todd: At the core, honestly, not a lot has changed in terms of what we’re here to do: help photographers do their work. I really believe photography matters. Whether it’s a photojournalist documenting something happening in another country, or a kid in art school just trying to figure out how to say something with a camera, it all has value. We’re wired to create things. And if we can be a small part of that by making gear people can actually rely on and love, that’s the thing that stays at the center.

Beyond that, I want us to tell more stories. Use whatever platform we’ve built to shine a light on photographers who are doing meaningful work for their communities. We don’t have a big budget for that kind of thing, so it’s about figuring out how to do it with real intention. We’re not just here to sell something. We genuinely care about this community, and I want what we put out there to keep reflecting that.

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