A new beginning

2025 marks the 75^th anniversary of British Wool, a farmer-owned marketing cooperative created to ensure a fair return for UK sheep farmers by marketing British wool. Yet wool prices have declined from historic highs of £14/kg (US$18.62) in 1950 to as little as £1/kg (US$1.33) today, often below the cost of shearing. Since 1970, cheap synthetic fibres have eroded the wool market in clothing and carpets.

Farmers have largely turned to breeds that produce meat, of which some do not require shearing and a lot of the wool is being incinerated. Today, the wool industry is sensing the opportunity for change as consumer opposition to plastics is increasing in some surveys, causing greater concern than the rising temperatures.

A familiar story

A familiar story for those in the leather trade, and one that explains why my weekly opinions for this journal have argued that now is the time for a major shift. The plastic issue is coming to a head as consumer groups become angry with fossil fuel countries continuing to block progress of the UN Global Plastics Treaty. Meanwhile, the leather industry is rethinking supply chains to be more able to withstand restless geopolitics, and it has a huge unused raw material supply that it needs to return to the market with innovative ideas.

The wool industry, along with meat, milk and cotton, was often noted as having had better generic campaigns than leather during the 20^th century. It is true, as despite the efforts of Guy Reaks, the long-term Secretary/Director of the International Council of Tanners, the industry refused to run campaigns. Sadly, compared to materials like wool and cotton, leather slowed its innovation.

The clever use of merino wools in base layers for outdoor activity was an early starter in new thinking about wool and new uses have now been found in insulation and acoustics, as well as in food packaging and horticulture products such as biodegradable plant pots. These types of collaborations are taking wool into technical composites with bioplastics and graphene for areas such as filtration, soundproofing and smart textiles with embedded sensors.

The continued expansion in performance wear adds more value to finer grades and all these new markets rely on wool’s renewability, biodegradability and local provenance. Now, wool demand and price are rising once again.

Collaboration: A dominant theme in 2025

Unsurprisingly, collaboration has become a dominant global theme in 2025, driven by the need to address complex, interconnected challenges that cannot be solved by nations, companies or communities acting alone. This aligns closely with the core principles of the Industrial Marketing and Purchasing (IMP) network theory which was the foundation of my PhD research. No business owns all its own technological needs, and today the world is even more complex with trade rules, geopolitics and advancing technology. Today, both the World Economic Forum (WEF) and the IMP consider cooperation to be an interactive, dynamic process embedded within ongoing network relationships spanning organisational, sectoral and even international boundaries.

The leather industry has lacked innovation for many decades. The consumer has been pulled away from leather by greedy brands and some careless leather industry talk on raw materials and processing. The rationale to pull them back will require a new approach to deal with the economic, environmental and cultural considerations that now shape the future of materials.

Overloaded with silos

Today, we must think about expanding markets, entering new ones, pooling R&D resources, applying digital innovations to sustainability via strategic alliances that can break down disciplinary silos, in which the leather trade is overloaded, and thinking more of co-creation with stakeholders.

At the WEF’s 2025 Annual Meeting, “Collaboration for the Intelligent Age” was the central theme. The agenda was structured around five interconnected strategic themes, all of which fit how the leather industry needs to progress.

Rebuilding trust

Across the board, we must increase transparency and widen the use of accredited third-party schemes, communicating sustainability and animal welfare standards, providing free labels with all the data on origin and sustainability, and sharing material on leather ethics and care more widely.

Reimagining growth

Innovation and new sources of growth are essential. Loss of raw material through climate change and the current consumer mentality will lead the industry to longer term decline and oblivion. Much more effort has to be put into circular economy models, which will likely involve further use of trimmings and shavings into hybrid materials, and more thought about the untanned wastes beyond simple gelatine products. In the modern industrial age, tanneries should experiment with material innovations, including hybrid or biobased leathers. Collaboration with biomaterial leaders makes sense, but to date has only been undertaken by a few tanneries. It offers ways to leverage the industry skills in collagen and non-woven structures plus great knowledge of the requirements of a huge number of market sectors. It allows access to consumers who do not want to buy animal-derived products and many other new revenue streams, as well as a more resilient business model in the face of changing terms of trade. Moreover, it will clearly encourage and excite the levels of innovation required to get uncollected hides and skins out of landfill and back into the leather sector, but not as cheap, heavily pigmented and downgraded commodities.

Investing in people

The WEF makes it clear that human capital development is at the heart of building resilient societies and emphasises the importance of investing in education, skills and good jobs that contribute to a modern and inclusive society. This is exactly what the leather industry offers; and in the numbers needed for regions like Africa and India where populations are still expanding and many new jobs are required each year. At the same time, the luxury industry relies on skilled artisans which will keep older staff in the developed world busy until late in their careers.

The industry must start to emphasise its support for fair wages, health and safety in tanneries and workshops, and offer full careers in all sectors where workers can improve their skill and add more value. Training must continue where automation and digital methods start to be incorporated (albeit in most sectors the craft element will remain dominant and training must focus on those skills). The leather industry must build a strong workforce with improved retention and become recognised for ethical and sympathetic employment practices.

Safeguarding the planet

Climate change and environmental degradation remain pressing issues. Collaboration across the board is required, particularly with agriculture where climate change could quite rapidly deplete the availability of raw material. Husbandry methods will require integrating more trees with livestock, known as silvopasture, to offer shade, shelter and enhanced soil health, with better water retention.

There have been major improvements in leather processing over the last thirty years, meaning that water, energy and chemical usage has diminished and waste streams are handled properly. Tanneries not only use less water, but more of that is returned clean. Tanneries and chemical supply companies have worked in parallel rather than together and we need some new processing methodologies which require different collaborative approaches and wider inputs. Tanners do not “make” leather, but condition a beautiful and clever material into leather doing the minimum necessary, but this “minimum” needs to be done even better. This should be the power of new partnerships. That, and renewable energy that is cheaper, cleaner and safer should become the norm.

At the same time, the industry must find ways to pressure those countries, regions and individual tanneries who so publicly fail to apply any ethical norms to their management of people, materials and waste into behaving responsibly. Be it ignorance, poverty or greed, the leather industry must try harder and work more publicly to bring this behaviour to an end. Otherwise, all is lost.

Industries in the intelligent age

A lot about leather is very traditional, but as proud as the industry is of its history, we must recognise that technology is reshaping manufacturing, retail and consumer expectations. We already have excellent Internet-of-Things-enabled tanning machinery, as well as AI for quality control and producing predictive supply chain analytics. Tanners already use digital platforms for marketing, customer engagement and some direct-to-consumer sales.

Using such tools appropriately should reduce waste, improve customer experiences and create stronger competitiveness, but tanners must remain sensitive to the expectations and nature of their customers who will increasingly see leather as the biophilic alternative to much of the modern world advancing around them.

In this world where challenges and opportunities interconnect, natural materials such as wool and leather have a new chance to grow. But key to doing so is new thinking, new types of innovation, a breaking down of boundaries and collaborations. Leather offers social cohesion via its type and quality of jobs, environmental sustainability when responsibly made and technological advancement when advanced through inspirational partnership.