I believe for a good leather product, itself must be in the following
1. Good Cut
2. Hand stitch
3. Using best portion of the leather
Good cut, a lot of major brands, after they goes into mass production, uses machine to do the cutting, well in business sense yes it is necessary, but if the leather artisan can use hand cut and achieve machine quality, that is superb quality
hand stitch, if you uses leather sewing machine, you will see that both side of the stitches is not the same, where's only when you use hand stitching, the effect is similar. This is due to the machine limitation.
Best Quality of leather. In a cowhide, the best part is the lower back portion, those branded products we see are using emboss leather, which is very costly. So a good laether artisan normally can sacrifce and entire piece of leather just to cut out the lower back portion (Of course they do not throw the rest away....)
Some leather if you take good care, it will age well in process and provide a good shine.
For that 2 link i provide, it does not compare with the major brands. It a style of its own, and in JP, there are quite a few of them...