Kyle Koster never thought he’d start a leather goods business. But he has always loved working with his hands, and his family inspired him to tinker and experiment with building new things. Growing up, he remembers his dad building an airplane in their garage.

“Range Leather Company was a hobby turned business. I never set out to turn it into what it is today,” Kyle says. Before founding Range Leather, Kyle had started a guitar accessory business and had planned to create leather straps. But once he licensed his guitar products, he soon found himself looking around for new business ideas.

“I was left with some leather and I was pretty bored,” he says. “I sometimes say that if I had more space, I might have done woodworking. But you know, leather, you can do it on a kitchen table, and that’s where I started crafting.”

Today, Kyle is the founder and CEO of Range Leather – a company he’s now been running for over a decade alongside his wife, Bailey. Today, Range Leather combines high quality leather with traditional craftsmanship to create wallets, handbags, and other accessories like customizable hats – all directly at their workshop and store in Laramie, Wyoming.

“We have this craftsman spirit of the West. Our retail store is like our headquarters. You can walk into our showroom and then you see all of our crafters working, so there’s this kind of experiential retail happening. You can sit there and ask them about how they’re hand stitching stuff and everything. That's the experience that we created – if it’s made in Wyoming, you should be able to see it get made in Wyoming.”

How Gusto’s time tracking and payroll features support range leather’s team

Range Leather first started using Gusto in 2023. They had previously used QuickBooks for payroll and time tracking – but they found QuickBooks wasn’t fully integrated with their time tracking tools, which created more manual work and raised costs for running payroll.

Yet time tracking is critical for Range Leather. Many of its employees work in manufacturing and production, and they need to verify they’re on-site and ready to work during their scheduled shifts. So when Kyle discovered Gusto and the Time Kiosk feature, he knew it was a game changer.

Gusto Time Kiosk enables Range Leather’s employees to clock in and out securely on any Internet-connected device – like a desktop, laptop, or tablet – at key physical locations at their workshop and store. And since Time Kiosk is fully integrated with Gusto’s payroll and scheduling tools, it’s reduced the amount of time that Kyle and his team need to spend tracking their employees’ hours.

Before using Gusto, they had to send their accountant their hours, verify they were accurate, and go back and forth to fix any mistakes. Since switching to Gusto, they save 8 hours every month when processing payroll, as everything is streamlined on the Gusto platform. Kyle shares:

“We have some part time staff that come in, and we needed a quick way for them to be able to track their hours when they're in the building working, and to sync that with payroll … We really wanted something integrated that was very easy for our employees to use. When you onboard employees, you need to think about the employee experience that they go through. The onboarding experience is a very strong tell of the organization or the company that they're going to work for.”

How Range Leather saves more than $3,600 a year with Gusto

By switching to Gusto to get a fully integrated platform for payroll, time tracking, and employee onboarding, Range Leather has been able to save over $300 a month in accounting services and time tracking – adding up to savings of more than $3,600 a year. Kyle shares:

• “When we used QuickBooks, our accountant processed our payroll. So we couldn't sync the time over to it … It was basically just a digital time clock that could generate a report, which then we would send to a PDF that we would check and then send to our accountant. Our accountant would then have to enter that PDF into their software and then process payroll. Then we found Gusto. Our accountant said, ‘If you could take payroll from me, I would love that.’”

“When we switched, we took such a huge burden off because of the services that Gusto offers … Our accountant actually lowered our monthly price retainer because we saved him so much time going back and forth via Gusto. So that was a huge time and money saver for us. It was a no brainer to totally switch to Gusto.”

With Gusto, Range Leather gets peace of mind in supporting their team

While Gusto saves Kyle and his team time and money, it also helps Range Leather’s employees. With Gusto, they know they’ll get paid accurately and on time. That peace of mind is critical for Kyle. He shares:

“One of the biggest flexibilities and freedoms for us with changing to Gusto is, we can process payroll anywhere we want in the world if we're traveling. And we know our employees are going to get paid. There was a lot of stress that I would say that was relieved with Gusto, because we were confident that we could get our employees paid in a proper time, and we weren't relying on anybody else.”