Before there was a buckle company there was a group of boys in Southern California who called themselves the Caballeros.
They were Valley boys in the 1960s, and grew up at the beach, in the sun, and at the diner. They were usually somewhere they probably shouldn't have been, doing something harmless.
They found each other through the YMCA's Hi-Y program. It started with about a dozen of them and grew to as many as fifty.
They pulled pranks on each other. Camped, fished, played poker late into the night. Golf, horseshoes, whatever counted as adventure that week. They got into trouble the way teenage boys do, nothing that would ruin you, just enough to make a good story later.
What started as a way to keep each other out of trouble turned into something bigger. A social club in the truest sense. The kind of guys other guys looked up to.
My grandfather, who recently passed, was one of them. The Caballeros are still thriving, and sixty years on the men still meet every September for a new adventure. My grandpa would tell me about each trip. Yellowstone, Colorado, and the Bristlecone pines were some of his favorites.
The Caballero name belongs to a group of men who showed me what loyalty and brotherhood look like. When it came time for me to name this brand, there wasn't really another option.
Read more Caballero Stories.
Through a fellow Caballero my grandpa met my grandma. They married, and together in 1979 started a belt buckle company in Southern California.
He designed every buckle himself. He'd have an idea, work it out on paper with a sketch artist, then hand it off to be sculpted by hand. Samples came back, and production followed. High relief, cast in America, built to be collected.
Caballero still uses that process today.
My mom grew up in the warehouse packing orders. No computers, no phones. Paper, boxes, and whatever shipped that day.
After years running the business they retired, and the company was sold. The new owners moved production overseas. The dies got cheaper, the relief got shallower, and the craft faded out of something my family had spent decades getting right.
I grew up around my grandparents' buckles and was normalized to the high quality, high relief in every buckle. Each one was personal, designed so someone could connect it to a memory, an object, a person.
Through my findings, newer buckles were cheap materials and bad design. Nobody was making buckles to be worn, collected, and lived in for a lifetime. Nothing made to be passed down.
So I went back to how my grandparents did it. Every design starts as a hand sketch. It gets sculpted oversized, allowing for high relief, then reduced to make the mold. Cast in solid pewter, in small batches. Polished by hand, which is why no two come out exactly alike.
Caballero is built on my grandparents' legacy. They're in every decision I make. Much like the Caballeros, still going today, these buckles are made to last, made to be passed down, made to be lived in.
Every buckle carries the name, Caballero.
Camren,
Founder and grandson of a Caballero.
