Mike Redwood
Columnist
International Leather Maker
Tanners sell leather into a long and increasingly noisy chain: agents, distributors, manufacturers, brands, retailers and, finally, consumers. At every stage, powerful voices try to shape perceptions of the material while tanners play with marketing tools like ingredient branding, origin branding, heritage branding, cause branding and more, largely ineffectually.
Yet, however elaborate the marketing, consumers hold the final choice on where their money goes. Their decisions are now being shaped by forces much larger than fashion and influencers: demographic change, economic insecurity, geopolitics, climate disruption and a growing demand to know what an object is, where it came from and whether it is worth keeping.
For leather, the consequence is not simply a need for better promotion. It is a challenge to rethink the material’s purpose, provenance and value.
The big shift: Growth is no longer assured
For leather, this matters because the industry has long assumed expanding populations, rising incomes and increasingly global consumption. Those assumptions are weakening at the same time as consumers demand greater confidence in a material’s origin, animal welfare, processing and durability.
For most of human history, high birth rates plus high mortality meant the world population hardly grew. From the 19th century, improvements in nutrition, sanitation, public health and medicine reduced mortality while fertility remained high. That gap produced the great population explosion of the 19th and 20th centuries. Only later did fertility itself fall, through a combination of falling child mortality, changing economic and social conditions, women’s education and autonomy, and increasingly effective contraception. The arrival of the contraceptive pill in the 1960s became a powerful symbol, and an important instrument, of that final transformation.
I was at university enjoying the 1960s and reading Ferlinghetti’s free verse which the traditionalist poet and writer Philip Larkin hated, as he sat 60 miles away in Hull writing Annus Mirabilis watching a new era pass him by:
“Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me) –
Between the end of the “Chatterley” ban
And the Beatles’ first LP”
Demographically, 1963 was significant as it is accepted as the year in which the rate of growth of the world’s population reached its historic peak. We were actually witnessing the eventual end of the great population explosion.
The decline in the rate of global population growth attracted far less attention than the continuing rise in the absolute number of people. With announcements and revisions in 2010 and 2011 the UN projected a world population of 10.1 billion by 2100. The number “10 billion” consequently became a powerful symbol of a supposedly imminent demographic crisis.
Yet the same data could tell a quite different story which Danny Dorling explained in his 2013 book, ‘Population 10 billion’, arguing that the slowdown in population growth was already sufficiently advanced for 10 billion to be understood not as another waypoint on an unlimited upward trajectory but as something approaching a ceiling.
The landscape tells the story
A little more than a decade later the demographic conversation has begun to turn from the fear of unlimited population growth towards the consequences of population ageing and decline. Japan is confronting depopulating regions, abandoned houses and the difficulty of maintaining services with fewer working-age people. Across parts of southern and eastern Europe, rural depopulation is associated with abandoned buildings, shrinking agricultural activity and landscapes losing the people who once managed them. I have witnessed this on my last two trips to Spain, especially this spring on a more extended tour.
Landscape that were expected to be under increasing pressure from population growth within a generation have come under pressure from the absence of people.
With this shift, the concern has changed from whether the world can produce enough to whether societies can organise themselves properly to distribute, conserve and adapt to what they have.
And geopolitics complicates the picture. Food insecurity can arise not because there is physically insufficient food globally, but because war, sanctions, blockades, energy disruption, damaged infrastructure, export restrictions and disrupted shipping routes prevent food, fertiliser or feed from reaching where it is needed. National food security has replaced global supply issues at the top of the agenda.
Climate change adds another layer as it forces changes in land use for crops and animals.
This means that leather’s current and future consumers are facing quite different lives in their new more urban lives in smaller homes, with less storage, lower disposable income and a different relationship with ownership.
From abundance to stewardship
Stewardship becomes a more useful idea than sustainability alone. Sustainability can too easily become a question of producing more with less damage. Stewardship asks something harder: what are we responsible for maintaining, and what must we leave capable of supporting those who come after us?
For leather, that question runs from animal husbandry and hide preservation through tanning chemistry, worker conditions, product design, repair and the realistic life of the finished object. It asks not only whether leather can be defended as a material, but whether each piece of leather deserves to exist and deserves to be kept.
What younger consumers are doing?
This comes at a difficult time for our younger generation who are struggling with the society they have grown up into. In China for example, youth today are beset by slow growth, high youth unemployment and a prolonged property downturn that has undermined family wealth, so there is a clear shift from faith in indefinite upward mobility toward a search for controllability. Secure work, savings, health and nearby leisure offer forms of certainty. This helps explain the popularity of hiking, cycling, pets, cafés, crafts, local tourism and home-centred comfort, not as trivial escapism, but as attempts to recover agency in everyday life. Escaping this will be hard, and perhaps it is not so much escape but steady adaptation that is really needed.
According to 2025 research by Accenture, How China’s Gen Z is reshaping consumption, Accenture Chinese Consumer Insights, May 11, 2026, the retail purchasing mood has already started to shift toward value, usefulness, identity and emotional return. 76% of Gen Z respondents prioritised economic practicality in major purchases, while only 24% emphasised lifestyle signalling.
One big change in China has been an end to the presumption that foreign automatically means superior precisely when western brands started raising prices and were adapting too slowly to changing expectations.
While these are China specifics, there are many underlying trends that appear to run across the globe with younger generations, not least that young adults are becoming reluctant to make irreversible commitments in an uncertain future. Talking about her forthcoming new book on fertility, Camilla Cavendish elaborates on the wider aspect of the replacement of inherited life scripts by continual calculation, postponement and conditional choice.
On demographics, the direction is clear although the speed varies greatly, with below-replacement fertility spreading. Even India has already crossed that threshold nationally with much of urban India considerably below it. The likely future is therefore not a neat sequence, Europe, then East Asia, then India, then Africa, but a global appearance of low-fertility metropolitan cultures appearing inside still-young and sometimes fast-growing societies.
Underlying this, children have moved from being the expected outcome of adult life to being an intensely considered, high-cost and increasingly conditional undertaking. All my children have given us grandchildren but the question of whether to have children was far from a given albeit the reality has been hugely fulfilling.
But if that conceptual change takes hold among the more recent generations, fertility can fall extraordinarily quickly, even while people continue to say that family is the most important thing in life.
What this means for leather
All of this has profound implications for consumption and what happens when consumer culture moves from buying signals to buying justifications? Leather should gain but what that leather looks like, where it fits and what consumers really need to know about it has changed.
If we add the potential economic slowdown coming with both demography and climate change, a question must be asked about the nature of capitalism when growth in the number of consumers can no longer be assumed, while the physical limits of the planet become increasingly apparent?
The leather industry will not survive unchanged
It is impossible to believe that leather can continue as before through all this. If Toffler really said that the future arrives faster than you expect and in the wrong order, he was right.
The latest 2026 survey from the Economic Observatory of Alliance France Cuir shows that even an educated body of consumers struggles to understand the materials in their goods so the choice of leather over alternatives is more complex than before, as does an expectation to know who made it, where it came from and what happened along the supply chain. Was the husbandry of the animal appropriate? I no longer believe the standards of the 20th century can survive; leather is commonly described as a co-product or byproduct of livestock systems, but that commercial relationship does not remove the industry’s responsibility.
The challenge
Leather’s old advantages, beauty, status, durability and tradition still matter. But they are no longer sufficient answers to the questions consumers increasingly ask: who made this, where did it come from, how was the animal kept, what chemicals were used, how long will it last and is it worth keeping?
Leather does not need more promotional scaffolding around an unchanged product. It needs a rethink from the hide and skin up: a clearer purpose, verifiable material truth and a form of branding that comes not from assertion, but from stewardship.
mike@internationalleathermaker.com
You can find Dr Mike Redwood across social media at @michaelredwood.
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