Peter Farkas thought he was done. Then a TikTok post in May turned the 70-year-old leatherworker’s handmade bags into the kind of item shoppers hunted for by name, sending a stream of customers toward his stalls in New York City and forcing him back into the work he had tried to leave behind.
The surge began when Janell Roberts told her 341,000 followers that Farkas’s bags were the secret status item of 2026. Her post sent people looking for a man she described as being on Sullivan Street in SoHo, and the bags — handmade, oversized and priced at $35 to $50 — quickly became a bargain object of desire in a market where the wait itself became part of the appeal.
Farkas has spent more than 50 years as a leatherworker, long before TikTok made his name circulate in the Gen Z years. He was a partner at Branded Leather nearly five decades ago, when the Long Island City tannery and leather factory made pieces worn by the Hells Angels, Tony Soprano and the Rolling Stones. He also created Bruce Springsteen’s outfit for the 1987 hit “Tunnel of Love,” and made the first pairs of leather pants sold by Canal Jeans.
The viral moment changed the scale of his daily life. His daughters, Jessica, Harley and Tana, now schlep up to 500 bags each week to SoHo’s St. Anthony Market or the UWS Grand Bazaar Market, keeping the supply moving while buyers crowd around for the hand-dyed cow or deer leather bags made at his tannery in upstate New York. A color variation that comes from the leather itself has even helped the frenzy, with shoppers calling the cobalt shade Janell Blue.
That is the part that keeps the story from sounding like a simple feel-good clip. Farkas had tried to retire, but the attention pulled him back in, and he was blunt about why. “I tried to retire and this happened,” he said. Asked why anyone should believe the bags were his, he answered even more plainly: “Everyone knows that I make them. Who else would?” The question now is not whether TikTok can sell a bag for $35; it is how long a small family operation can ride that kind of demand before the crowd moves on to the next obsession.
