09/07/2026
Ahead of something rather special arriving over the next few days, we thought we’d introduce you to the man behind it.
Meet Zip Stevenson. If you’ve spent any time around the heritage world, chances are you’ve come across his work—even if you didn’t realise it. Zip isn’t simply a designer. He’s a vintage dealer, historian, collector, leatherworker, and one of the people most responsible for preserving the craft of classic American leather goods.
His journey actually began with repair. In the early 1990s he founded Denim Doctors in Los Angeles, repairing vintage jeans and leather goods. Thousands of garments passed through his hands, giving him an intimate understanding of how these pieces were actually made—not just how they looked.
That experience led to an obsession with vintage American belts from the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s. He collected them, studied them, took them apart, and learned from them. Eventually, the originals became almost impossible to find. So instead of simply collecting them, he started making them himself.
That’s how Hollywood Trading Company was born.
What we particularly admire about Zip’s approach is that he never set out to reinvent the belt. Instead, he asked a much more interesting question: what made the originals so good?
The answer wasn’t just the leather. It was the hand-set studs, the tooling, the hardware, the proportions, and all the little details that only reveal themselves after handling hundreds of original vintage examples.
It’s a philosophy that feels very familiar to us. Understand the past. Respect it. Learn from it. Then recreate it with the same care and craftsmanship that made the originals worth preserving in the first place.
Tomorrow, we’ll take a closer look at the belts themselves.