Dave Munson
CEO at Saddleback Leather Co.
Dave Munson, from Portland, Oregon, owns Saddleback Leather Co. based out of Fort Worth, Texas. He first started selling the leather bags he designed off the tailgate of his old Toyota Land Cruiser with his Black Lab, Blue. He has since opened a factory in Mexico, married the girl of his dreams and has a daughter and son.
In 1999, Dave was a volunteer English teacher in Southern Mexico and sketched out a leather bag to be made to carry his books. Back in the US, 4 or 5 times a day people would stop him to ask where they could buy a bag like his. In 2003, he finally moved to Juarez Mexico with his dog just across the border from El Paso, Texas. He had a father and son send bags up to the Juarez bus station and he would pick them up there and take them to El Paso to sell on eBay. He and Blue slept on the floor of his $100/mo. apartment for 3 years with no hot water, A/C, or heat, for all of the money he saved on living expenses, he reinvested into buying more leather bags.
In 2006, he met his wife on Myspace and moved to San Antonio, Texas. In 2008, they started their factory, Old Mexico Manufacturing in Leon, Guanajuato to make their own leather goods. He found that nobody cares about your stuff as much as you do. It has been humming ever since. But not without some very difficult situations and learning 1000 ways to get cheated.
Dave’s journey started in Mexico where he found a little leather shop that could make a bag just the way he wanted. That bag turned into a dozen bags that Dave peddled from the back of his car which has now become the foundation for a multi-million dollar business. Dave shares how his call to ministry and business merged and why their leather bags are so good that if you own one, your children and your children’s children will fight over it when you’re dead...