ARMA

ARMA

Arma is a Dutch leather and shearling house founded in Badhoevedorp in 1985 by Aram Aykaz, whose father had traded leather skins and shearling in Armenia since the early 1950s. Aykaz started as a cleaner at a leather company, learned the trade, and eventually began designing garments from his own fabrics.

Jackets and blazers

Leather and shearling jackets are what this house is for, and they have been since 1985. The knowledge is three generations deep, running from Aram's father trading skins in Armenia in the early fifties to the workshop outside Amsterdam. That lineage is why the leather selection is better than the brand's profile suggests.

More Jackets and blazers

Aykaz founded the company with three partners and passed the craft on to his children. In July 2024 his son Arden and daughter Maral took over the leadership from their father and his co-founders. Family businesses that survive the handover are rarer than they sound.

Skirts

Roughly two-thirds of the production process is kept in-house alongside design, and the company runs its own facility in Turkey with around forty-five staff. That control is unusual at this scale, and it is the reason the finishing is consistent across a range this broad. It also means the separates get the same treatment as the jackets.

Trousers and shorts

By 2021 the brand was selling through more than two hundred retailers across more than eleven countries, with Germany as the biggest market and Italy second. This is a wholesale house, not a runway one. The lack of fashion-week theatre is the business model rather than an oversight.

Coats

The house argument about shearling is that it improves with age, so the coats are cut for a decade rather than a season. That is a commitment the trade press has documented rather than a slogan the brand invented recently. Upcycling collections have been in development since 2023.

More from the collection

There are no awards to list and no celebrity history to cite, because this has always been a family leather manufacturer that happens to design well. The coverage lives in Dutch trade press rather than Vogue. Judge it on the hides.

Our honest take

Buy the shearling, then the leather jackets, and treat everything else as supporting cast. This is the best value-for-craft proposition in the whole list and the least glamorous story attached to it. That trade-off is usually worth making.