Hey. I’m Vitalii. Modern pirate.

Not in the sense of black flags and plundered ships — though I won’t rule it out. A pirate in the older sense: someone who builds things from nothing, ships goods across the world from a small crew, and answers to nobody but his craft and his customers.

The Sparrow’s Nest

My workshop sits on the 21st floor of an apartment building in Kyiv. Three rooms, a view of the whole city, and the kind of altitude that makes you feel like you’re watching the world from the rigging.

I call it the Sparrow’s Nest.

One room is for cutting and stitching. One room is for packaging. The third room is for leather crafter friends, a bottle of whiskey, and evenings where nobody talks about shipping timelines.

Walk in and you smell it before you see anything. Leather. Almond oil. Wax. It smells exactly like a workshop should.

How this started

I was a cameraman. Freelance film work — the kind that disappeared overnight in 2020. COVID cleared the calendar completely, and I had to figure out what came next.

Leather had been a quiet hobby for years. Suddenly it had the floor.

The first workspace was my bedroom. Twelve square meters. One table, leather scraps on every surface, a newborn son named Tim in the corner of the same room, and absolutely no idea how to run a business. My wife was there. The chaos was complete.

I didn’t have a plan. I had a craft and a reason to make it work.

Why pirates

People ask this all the time. They expect a clever answer.

The real answer is embarrassingly simple: I’ve been obsessed with pirates since I was seven. My bedroom walls were covered in drawings of pirate ships — I drew them myself, over and over. My mother kept every single one of them. One of those drawings is in the workshop now, waiting for the right frame to go on the wall.

The LEGO pirate sets I collected as a kid? Still exist. My son Tim, who is six and already more of a pirate than I’ll ever be, has claimed all of them.

The name Pirate Goods was never a marketing decision. It was the only name that felt honest.

The business during the war

Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. I’m not going to write around it.

The workshop stayed open. Orders kept shipping. The community of people carrying Pirate Goods in their pockets — mostly in the US — kept ordering, kept writing reviews, kept sending notes. That mattered more than I can explain in a paragraph.

I’ve now been running this business during wartime longer than I ran it before the war. It didn’t break the business. If anything, it sharpened my focus. A lot of people are counting on me. Stopping wasn’t something I considered.

My wife, Tim, and my daughter Emilia — who just turned two — are in Portugal now, somewhere quieter. Tim is starting school there.

I’m in Kyiv. I can’t leave Ukraine. So I work.

Six years in

It’s 2026. Over 7,000 orders. Over 700 reviews.

A customer named Evan once wrote: “Came with a handwritten note thanking me for the support — which I thought went the extra mile. Combined with the fact that Vitalii reads every review himself, this shows me that he really cares about delivering to the best of his ability.”

He’s right. I do read every one.

What I didn’t expect, back in that twelve-square-meter bedroom, was how much bigger the job would get. The pressure, the responsibility, the hundred things running simultaneously that have nothing to do with stitching leather. It’s a real business now, which is a completely different thing from a craft.

But on Saturday mornings, when Tim used to visit the workshop, we’d build castles out of cardboard shipping boxes and leather scraps. For an hour the workshop wasn’t a business. It was just a space two pirates were exploring.

I think about that a lot.

What I make

Full-grain leather from named Italian tanneries. Hand-stitched, cut and finished in the Sparrow’s Nest, shipped from Kyiv to wherever you are.

Wallets, knife sheaths, coin holders, EDC organizers. Gear for people who carry things that mean something to them and want something worthy to carry them in.

Not for everyone. Not supposed to be.

If you made it this far — we probably already have a lot in common.

— Vitalii
Kyiv, Ukraine — June 2026