I grew up in Toronto. And if you know Toronto, you know it's a city with taste — genuinely multicultural, design-aware, with a quiet confidence that doesn't need to announce itself. It shaped how I see things. The details. The materials. The difference between something that looks considered and something that actually is.
I spent years around design before I ever built anything of my own. It was always in my periphery — the way a space was laid out, the weight of a well-made object, the specific satisfaction of something that functioned exactly as it should. I was drawn to it the way some people are drawn to music. Not as a career plan. Just as a way of seeing.
When I finally decided to build something, I started where a lot of founders start: not quite in the right place.
I launched a skincare brand.
It wasn't a bad idea. I approached it with the same obsession I bring to everything — the belief that everyday products should be genuinely good, not just marketable. And it worked, up to a point. But something kept nagging at me. A feeling that I was circling something without landing on it.
The pull toward fashion had been there my whole life. Not fashion in the loud sense — not logos, not seasons, not the relentless churn of what's in and what's out. Fashion in the older sense. Objects made with intention. Pieces that developed character over time. The craft underneath the surface that most people never think to look for.
I kept noticing bags. In meetings. On the street. The ones that sat right, moved right, said something without trying to. And I kept noticing the gap — between what existed at the luxury end of the market and what was available to everyone else. The heritage houses charge for history as much as craft. The fast fashion alternatives look the part for a season and fall apart by the next.
There was space in the middle for something honest. I decided to fill it.
Starting With Vegan Leather
Marus launched with premium vegan leather. That was a deliberate choice — not a compromise. We wanted to build something considered from the ground up, and that meant thinking carefully about materials from day one.
The early pieces were a design exercise as much as a product launch. Could we make something that felt genuinely premium without relying on heritage signalling? Could the design carry the weight on its own — clean lines, structured silhouettes, hardware-free facades that didn't need decoration to communicate quality?
The answer, it turned out, was yes.
Growing Into Genuine Leather
As the collection developed and our relationships with our makers deepened, the natural next step became clear: genuine leather.
Not as a departure. As a deepening.
Genuine leather — sourced carefully, crafted properly — is one of the most enduring materials in the history of objects. It rewards use. It develops character in your hands over years. It's the material that master craftspeople have built careers around understanding.
We're now incorporating it into select pieces alongside our vegan leather line. Both materials. One standard. The same obsessive attention to construction, proportion, and detail that has defined every piece we've made since the beginning.
The People Who Build It
None of this exists without the makers.
We work with craftspeople who have spent years — in some cases decades — learning how leather behaves. How a seam holds under daily use. How hardware should feel after a thousand openings. How the interior of a bag should be laid out not for the photo, but for the Thursday afternoon when you need three things simultaneously and don't have time to think about it.
These are not factory workers running production lines. They are people who take genuine pride in what they build, who notice the details no brief would ever specify, and who understand that a bag made properly is a bag that lasts.
That's who builds Marus. And that relationship — between design intent and skilled hands — is the most important one we have.
Where We're Going
The catalogue is growing. Slowly, deliberately, in the only way that makes sense for a brand built on this foundation.
Every new piece has to earn its place. It has to answer the same question we've asked since the beginning: does this deserve to exist?
If the answer isn't immediately yes, we keep working until it is. Or we don't make it at all.
That's the standard. It's the only one we know.
Efnan
Toronto, Canada