Galco is the largest leather holster manufacturer in America, and has been in business for more than fifty years.
October 11, 2024
By James Tarr
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I recently had an opportunity to tour Galco’s facility in Phoenix, Arizona. I knew Galco Gunleather was a large, successful holster company , dating back to The Famous Jackass Leather Company started in 1969, but I didn’t realize just how large and successful Galco was and is. Galco is the largest leather holster maker in the United States, and has roughly 200 employees working in their 80,000 square-foot facility. In addition to doing leather holsters, they have injection molding machines, they make Kydex holsters, and they even have their own foundry, where they make all the brass hardware for their belts. Scott Feck, the Vice President of Operations, gave me a detailed tour of their production facility, and in the process I received a masterclass education in leather. Galco has 3,500 SKUs, and almost every one involving leather goes through the same “assembly line,” a set number of operations and departments. Leather that becomes a holster has to be cut, split (shaved down for thickness), creased, logo’ed, mated with at least one other piece of leather (either glued or stitched). The edges have to be finished (rounded, burnished, painted), and then it may go to hand molding and hand oiling, depending. Then the hardware is attached.
Galco has their own foundry, and makes these aluminum pistols around which they hand-mold their premium holsters. Feck first walked me back to one of their storage areas for incoming leather, and my education started there. Surrounded by massive sheets of leather, Feck explained, “Leather is basically a byproduct of the beef industry. A lot of packing houses now will do the first step in tanning, which is de-hairing. They’ll turn the leather into what is known as ‘wet blues,’ so it is no longer a product that will rot. Just like the meat industry, there are different cuts of leather. For a century when we had shoe soles as a big consumer of leather, they would do shoulder cuts and double butts across the bottom. Those cuts, for the most part, don’t exist in America today. Today, you really have two choices—sides or a full hide. But nobody works with the full hides of grown steers, they’re too big. Maybe calves, or lambs or goats, but a full steer hide is 45 to 50 square feet. What the packing houses do is ship sides to the tanning houses. For a side the hide is cut down the middle, and that’s how tanners want to sell their leather today, sides, but we want backs. They’ll trim the belly off for us—we don’t want to deal with the bellies, the bellies are soft and fatty and don’t work well for what we’re doing. That way we don’t fill up our dumpster with leather we’re not using. You pay for leather by the square foot.
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“There are two basic types of tanning in the world today, vegetable tan or chrome tan. Veg tan is basically using bark extracts from specific trees, they make a tea out of the bark and use it in the tanning. It is called vegetable tanning because those are very natural compounds. Vegetable tanning is used for heavier, thicker leather that gets molded, like saddles and shoe soles. With the demise of the leather shoe/shoe sole industry, the number of vegetable tanneries has dropped precipitously. There might have been a hundred or a more back in the day. Today there are two in America, plus one specialty tannery. We buy from both of those tanneries; that’s where we get 100% of our veg tan leather. We don’t have to fight with any of the other larger holster makers to get product from these tanneries because those other holster makers buy from Mexico and South America. Our leather is tanned in the U.S., and for the most part our cows are U.S. steers, although a few are from Canada. Actually, Canadian cows are cleaner, and what I mean by cleaner is less bug bites and less imperfections on the skin. The cooler the temperatures the better. Chrome tanning is where they use chromium salts. It’s not inferior, just different. Softer leather, garment leather, gloves, pants, jackets, and upholstery leather, that’s all chrome tanned. Today, the biggest consumer of leather in America is the auto industry, for upholstery. Think how much leather you need for a car seat, versus a holster.”
Galco’s Vice President of Operations Scott Feck educating Tarr on leather. He holds a back piece, which is how Galco orders their leather. This piece has been dyed “Havana” at the tannery. Leather comes in various thicknesses, textures, and grades, and can be ordered natural or dyed at the tannery. Feck explained, “We order backs in black and Havana (dark brown) color—they dye that at the tanneries, the first step, but we do several more steps on top of that. Galco tan—we do that color 100% in house. We turn natural leather into Galco tan primarily through hand-rubbed oils, which requires several steps over several days. For the most part, our competitors have the tannery create a tan color using dyes and they don’t have to do any finishing work to the leather. We think that color’s ugly. We developed Galco tan in the late '60s and early '70s. It’s the difference between a budget wood stock from Ruger and what you’ll find on a Holland & Holland rifle. Leather is sorted by grade, A, B, and C, based on appearance—blemishes. The nice thing about what we do, our products are relatively small, so we can cut around blemishes, unlike a saddle maker. The other problem we have is what we call “chicken pox”—little tiny dots, bug bites, and they’re really hard to see until you put water or oil on the leather and then they pop out. Of course, that’s not done until two-thirds of the way through our process, and we’ve got all that labor into it. But our people have gotten really good at finding that stuff early.”
As for cutting holsters out of leather, Feck told me, “When Galco started in ‘69 everything was cut by hand with a knife. You would have a cardboard pattern, trace it with a pen, and once it was traced out you would cut it. And then we moved from handcutting to die cutters, cookie cutters with presses. Everything was cut out with dies, and we made the dies here ourselves. Then in 2013 we brought in our first die-less cutter.” And Feck proceeded to show me what looked like an employee playing a life-sized video game with light-show holsters. Galco’s current process is fascinating. It is computerized, and starts with projecting the color-coded images of holsters onto a leather hide spread out on a table. The operator was beside the table, working a mouse, looking back and forth between the hide and a computer showing the same image. Feck explained, “What’s happening here is all of our thousands of shapes are in the computer and coded for what kind of leather it needs, type and grade, for front, back, and/or liner. The operator puts in how many of what shape she wants and the computer maps it for her. The operator may see some things she doesn’t like in the leather, so we can work around the imperfections the cameras don’t see and manually move the templates around. The computer takes a picture and it will serial number that hide and store the data in the computer.”
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The two-head, two-arm die-less robotic cutter Galco uses to cut their leather. They sit on a six-meter-long table, and you can see there is room for a second hide past the first. Freshly cut holsters in a hide. This leather is natural color, and destined to be tanned or more likely hand-oiled once it is finished being worked. The hides are then taken to long tables and laid out, where they are cut robotically. In 2013 Galco bought their first two-head, two-arm, die-less cutter, made in Italy. The cutters are built atop a six-meter-long table, big enough that the workers can be laying out one hide while the machine is cutting up the other, so there is no wasted time. The next step is trimming the leather to the proper thickness, and Galco does this using a machine that feeds the leather through two rollers, and what is best described as a toothless bandsaw cuts the back off the leather. Feck explained, “Each product is engineered to use a specific thickness of leather. We sometimes get complaints from customers that our leather is ‘too thin’—no, you’ve been buying holsters made out of horse tack, that hasn’t been thinned. Small holster makers are using this super-bulky heavy leather, and that’s not what you want in a conceal carry product, which shouldn’t be any thicker than it needs to be.”
After the leather pieces are cut out, they are creased. This is done with dies and presses. They put creases in leather for two reasons—to tell the sewers where to sew (on harder leather it is called stitching) and decoration. Water is applied during many processes, which makes the leather more susceptible to carving, folding, creasing, and impressions—much more so when working with chrome-tanned leather. Next the logo and product code are stamped into the product. The product code stamped on the back of every Galco holster has all sorts of info including what tannery the leather came from and the date made. A lot of work has to go into the cut edges of the leather. It has to be rounded, polished, burnished, and painted. The first step to getting a round polished edge is taking the corners off, and that has to be done by hand—by an experienced hand. As for exotic leathers—sharkskin, alligator, stingray—their edge standard for exotics is it needs to feel like the edge of a drinking glass. As smooth under your finger as a rim of polished glass. They use about thirteen coats of paint on the edges of their exotic leather holsters—the customers are paying more, and Galco figures they deserve that extra attention to detail.
Galco uses harness stitchers on belts/holsters/etc. which perfectly simulate hand-sewing. Each stitch is independent, so if you pull one stitch it will not unravel. Feck then walked me to the area where their holsters are hand-molded, and I saw a huge wall of aluminum guns. As they have their own foundry, Galco decided making their own aluminum 1-for-1 replicas of pistols was the best option. A veteran employee was there, using a lot of elbow grease to hand-mold a belt holster around an aluminum 1911. Feck told me, “Our premium steerhide products are still molded by hand. The holsters have been wetted with water and given time for the water to penetrate all the way to the innermost fibers. Our competitors will press-mold, but the problem with press-molding is you can damage the fibers, and weaken the structural integrity of the leather, and if you oil the leather it turns out blotchy. Of course, they don’t oil their leather, they achieve their color with the use of dye(s). If you’re hand-oiling, you don’t want to press the leather, you hand-mold it. By hand-molding it, going back and forth on the holster, it produces a burnishing effect you don’t get on a straight press, which adds to the hues and character of the leather. It is strenuous, and takes a skilled worker, and takes twenty times longer than press molding, but we think the result is worth it.”
Miami Vice helped put Galco on the map. Don Johnson wore a Miami Classic shoulder rig throughout the entirety of the show, first for his Bren Ten and then for a S&W .45 auto (as seen here, the very rig itself). This is displayed in the Galco lobby, along with a lot of other holsters they’ve done for Hollywood. After molding the holsters are oiled by hand, put in a heated room and dehumidified overnight, oiled again, dried out, and maybe oiled again. The holsters go back and forth between the oiler and the hot/dry room three or four times, until they look just right. I first became aware of Galco holsters when Don Johnson as Sonny Crockett was running around Miami carrying his Bren Ten in a Galco Miami Classic shoulder rig. It was and still is the standard for shoulder holsters, and when it comes to leather holsters in America Galco is still setting the standard.
