Marley Hodgson started Ghurka in Connecticut in 1975 after buying a nearly 75-year-old leather bag at an antiques auction, one that had belonged to a British officer attached to the Gurkhas, the Nepali regiments recruited into the British Indian Army. He tracked down the English tannery that had made its original saddle leather and spent years working out how to replicate it domestically, naming the company after the regiment as a nod to where the idea started. The first product, a leather knapsack made for his son and nicknamed "Bucky's Bag," set off what collectors still call the Marley Hodgson era, running from that 1975 launch to 2003.