IM Leathers to stay in business

IM Leathers is going to keep on making motorcycle gear, Jennifer Mavrinac informs us.

For decades, IM Leathers built top-quality suits for Canada’s fastest racers, but when founder Ivan Mavrinac died early in the spring, the business’s future was in question.

Now his daughter Jennifer says she’s going to do repairs and alterations, as well as continue producing new suits, at the shop at 257 King Street East in downtown Hamilton. She says they also have a storefront space at the new location, along with the shop.

If you’re an IM Leathers customer, you might have met Jennifer before – she’s been around the shop ever since she was a toddler. In the past, she not only helped Ivan with his work, but also worked in the fashion world, even running a couple companies of her own, and worked as a graphic designer. She was responsible for the graphics on many sets of leathers from Ivan’s shop.

In an email, Jennifer told us, “My decision to keep the shop was both an easy and a hard one. While he (Ivan) had been in the hospital following his heart attack I found I simply had absolutely no where to send people if I didn’t do the work for them.”

She said it was easy enough to do the work for them – the hard part was quitting her other job to work at IM Leathers full-time and run it by herself, although she does have some part-time staff that help her out when she’s busy.