The Japanese art of Kintsugi and what it taught us about design

What is Kintsugi?

Kintsugi is the Japanese practice of repairing broken pottery with gold. When a ceramic bowl or cup cracks, the break is filled with lacquer mixed with powdered gold, silver or platinum. The result is an object whose fracture lines are its most luminous feature. The word translates as "golden joinery" or "golden repair," and the practice is several hundred years old, originating in Japan during the Muromachi period.

The philosophy behind the gold

Kintsugi belongs to a broader Japanese aesthetic called wabi-sabi, which finds beauty in imperfection, transience and the evidence of age. Where much of Western design has pursued the unmarked surface and the seamless finish, Kintsugi insists that the history of an object is part of its value. A crack is not a failure. It is a record of use, of time, of an accident that the object survived. Filling it with gold is a way of saying: this happened, and it made the object more interesting.

This is a genuinely difficult idea to hold onto when mass production has made flawless surfaces cheap and identical. The imperfect object asks you to look more carefully. It asks you to value what is actually there rather than what you expected.

What Kintsugi taught us about leather

We have been thinking about Kintsugi since we started making sandals. Our leather is vegetable tanned, processed using naturally occurring tannins rather than chemicals, and it carries the marks of the animal it came from: small scars, variations in texture, the subtle geography of a life lived outdoors. We have never tried to hide this. A sandal that shows no evidence of its own material or making tells you one story. A sandal that carries the mark of its leather and the hand of the person who made it tells you a more honest one.

The Kintsugi Joinery sandal

When we designed the Kintsugi Joinery sandal, we wanted to make that philosophy visible in the object itself. The fine leather straps cross the foot the way gold lacquer traces a repaired crack: deliberately, with precision, following a line that was always there. The sandal does not pretend to be anything other than what it is. Leather, craft, and a centuries-old conviction that what has been marked by life is worth more, not less, for it.

Shop the Kintsugi Joinery Sandals.