PHILADELPHIA _ When a man is on the road a lot for work, he tires of filling his free hours in bars. At least Mike Balitsaris did.
Yet it was time in a pub in Red Wing, Minn., that set the former real estate redeveloper and frack-sand producer on his current entrepreneurial path peddling handmade leather bags and sandals, often from an Airstream trailer.
Yes, Balitsaris is 48 and the father of four. No, this is not a midlife crisis. Waltzing Matilda, his business _ based outside Philadelphia and named after a song he would often listen to with his father _ is actually a return, albeit in a high-end way, to a creative passion that helped him earn spending money while an English major at Villanova University.
Inspired by a pair he bought in Greece on a summer trip, Balitsaris started making sandals for friends at school. With the economy in miserable shape and no jobs when he graduated in 1990, Balitsaris went on the road with his sandals, making them at night from scraps of leather he got from a shoe store. He sold them to beach shops along the East Coast.
Although he "loved the reuse concept," his soon-to-be father-in-law did not like the idea of his daughter marrying a sandal-selling nomad.
So Balitsaris joined another Villanova alum with a passion for reuse, Mike O'Neill, and spent about 18 years with him as partners in Preferred Real Estate Investments. They developed commercial properties through adaptive reuse, including a former power plant, a toilet factory and a tire-manufacturing facility.
What followed was Preferred Sands, a fracking-supply company created in 2007 and led by O'Neill. Balitsaris still has a partnership stake in it.
He was on a business trip for Preferred Sands when, in that Minnesota watering hole, he made his career-altering observation: The Red Wing Shoe Co. across the street was getting rid of its leather scraps.
Balitsaris left town with as many leather pieces "as I could fit in the rental car" _ in sizes ranging from a coin to half a cow's hide. The cost: a case of Leinenkugel's beer.
He would make bags while on business flights for Preferred, attracting interest from passengers. The impetus to make it his full-time focus came when his wife, Maureen, posted a picture of a bag on Facebook that caught the attention of someone at Apple Inc. in 2013. That led to a contract to produce 15,000 bags for Apple's website.
The opportunity presented Balitsaris with a reality check: He could no longer be a one-man manufacturer. He found a shoe company in Maine whose work had largely moved to Asia, and he taught the employees there how to make bags, and later sandals.
He repeated that process elsewhere, driven by the melancholy he encountered at Preferred Real Estate as he toured abandoned properties where workforces in some cases had diminished from "20,000 workers to none," Balitsaris said. "It would crush us."
"So I wanted to make everything in the U.S.," he said. Instead of doing that from one central location, "I followed the microbrew idea _ have microfactories and then augment training and reuse equipment. I knew there were good workers everywhere."
Waltzing Matilda's creations are now the work of 12 employees at the headquarters and shop, four in Philadelphia, and 32 in Maine, New York (city and upstate), and New Jersey.
Annual sales are $1.5 million, and the company reached profitability for the first time this year, Balitsaris said.
Its most expensive product so far, he said, was an alligator tote priced at $12,000 (made from a skin a friend received from a hunter in Florida and brought to Balitsaris). The most popular bags sell for $350, with the average purchase for jewelry and accessories _ key chains, coasters, cellphone cases _ totaling $150.
Arguably priceless is the value of the stories behind the materials used.
Consider the company website description of the $1,600 WWII Ammo Sling Bag, made from more than eight individual ammunition cases from the Swiss Army, detailed with original collar buttons: "It even has handwritten numbers and names from the soldiers who used them originally."
For another bag, chaps found in an old tack shop formed the sides, with the rest made from a section of Navajo rug. Still another features fabric found at a flea market in New York that was from an African tribe.
"I don't want to compete on margin," Balitsaris said. "I want to compete on creativity."
It's the right approach, said II Luscri, executive director of the Innovation, Creativity and Entrepreneurship Institute at Villanova, a nonprofit fellowship program that aims to help students start their own businesses.
"People today are really craving in the marketplace the unique, customized experience," Luscri said. "We're seeing that in the fashion and design space, as well."
Enabled in large part by social media, consumers also are considering businesses' personal stories in deciding which to patronize.
"People want to know what these entrepreneurs stand for," Luscri said.
At Waltzing Matilda, it's a respect for what was and the use it still can have.
"These things do have a soul. Think about this bag," Balitsaris said of the Ammo Sling. "Pieces from World War II. Who the hell knows what it saw?"
In addition to being featured on the website, Waltzing Matilda's bags and sandals have sold in some of the finest U.S. boutiques, at Bloomingdale's, and in six shops in Japan.
A new opportunity with Starwood Hotels will expand the company's reach into interior decorating by creating leather foyers in each room of a new hotel in Brooklyn and one in Miami.
Totes and wine bags made from scraps from those jobs will be offered for sale at the hotels, Balitsaris said.
He also is hoping to land custom work with professional offices such as law and accounting firms, as well as universities.
Naturally, Balitsaris has started with his alma mater. Waltzing Matilda made custom coasters and placemats for the boardroom at Villanova and is working on finalizing plans to sell products in the campus bookstore.
He also is in discussions with Follett Corp., the Illinois-based operator of nearly 1,200 campus stores.
