Local brand makes the pages of national magazine
Pieces by Cocodri have a kind of intentional craftsmanship that's impossible to miss. It's the reason, no doubt, the Lafayette brand can be found in the latest pages of Garden & Gun.
"We're thrilled," says Mary Tutwiler, the woman that began the brand quite by accident. "We are a very very small company."
The size of the company, however, is certainly no indicator of the quality of these gator skin products. The flask featured in Garden & Gun is one of a handful of designs created by the four-person Cocodri team.
"Every piece is made by hand," Mary says. "We are designing all the time."
That first design, however, was a simple one - a wallet. Mary, a once writer for the IND, was on assignment at a local tannery when the beauty of an alligator skin captured her attention.
"I bought one and had no earthy idea what I'd do with it," she says of the turquoise skin.
She headed to friends she knew could craft something from it with a simple old wallet. A week later she had two wallets made from the skins (she still has one in her purse).
"When I saw it my jaw dropped," Mary says.
Those two that created the wallet along with Mary's daughter formed Cocodri and are going on four years in business. They sell the wares at kiki, Genterie and Mignon Faget locally.