Mike Redwood

Columnist

International Leather Maker

Everyone who has completed an MBA or senior business management course will have been exposed to balanced scorecards and dashboards. When using them, you quickly see how a collection of performance indicators can switch from helpful to dangerous as soon as they become targets. They risk pulling decision-making from the tannery floor into offices, missing on-the-spot realities and overlooking context—ultimately damaging the ability of staff to use their own judgment. Leathermaking, first and foremost, depends on well-trained and trusted artisans.

I accept that measurement and control have their place. The Booth & Co founder Charles Booth famously challenged flawed late 19th century data on poverty, going on to produce his Poverty Maps of London. His work demonstrated how questioning poor metrics can lead to better understanding and improved policy, being instrumental in leading the fight for a universal old age pension. But measuring the wrong things, too many things, or things not linked to quality or strategy, creates risks—the same risks scorecards are meant to guard against.

Readers will know I have long argued that the modern concept of meritocracy undervalues the craftsmen and women who make and work with leather. Even in larger tanning units, every hide and skin should be individually assessed, certainly in the early stages, and— even in the most mechanised tanneries—several times along the way. While specifications matter, leather ultimately depends on organoleptic properties that should only be judged by skilled artisans.

The metrics-heavy approach emerged in the post-1989 era, shaped in part by the ideas of Francis Fukuyama and the broader belief in markets, globalisation and technocratic management. Over time, this evolved into a system where efficiency, measurement and growth became dominant organising principles.

It was soon recognised that this model did not deliver genuine equality of opportunity. It favoured those suited to office and screen-based work while leaving behind those who preferred to work with their hands. Yet little was done to correct this imbalance.

Frictionless markets

As the 1990s and 2000s became defined by globalisation, meritocracy and financialisaton, GDP growth became a proxy for success. Technocrats were given charge, pushing for efficiency everywhere. Biodiversity became a secondary concern and much of the economy was increasingly commoditised.

Rather than reaching the theoretical ideal of frictionless markets, this system encouraged mass commoditisation. Manufacturing shifted globally in search of cheaper inputs, particularly labour, often at the expense of quality and always losing resilience and local tacit knowledge.

At the same time, society avoided more difficult questions about value, meaning and contribution. Markets determined value through price, experts managed outcomes and consumers were encouraged to borrow and spend, because spending supported GDP growth, one of our most faulty metrics.

Before the Industrial Revolution, output per head grew only slowly. From the late eighteenth century onwards, Britain entered a period of sustained growth in real income, supported by industrialisation and access to large markets. The modern concept of GDP itself, however, only emerged in the 1930s and 1940s, after considerable experimentation with how best to measure national income.

Some level of economic growth clearly matters for wellbeing; people need to feel they are progressing. Weak income growth is now linked to rising inequality and insecurity. But this does not change the fact that much GDP growth has been achieved by encouraging overconsumption, overproduction and environmental neglect—far removed from the principles of sustainability set out by Gro Harlem Brundtland.

Overproduction dangers

Recent experience in China illustrates how GDP targets can encourage overproduction and misallocation of capital, particularly where domestic demand is weak, and investment has been driven by growth targets rather than real need. A property boom that left more than 50 million unfinished houses, and a necessary production boom requiring huge exports to meet current GDP targets.

High GDP growth has often been associated with extractive development: mass production, disposability and environmental damage, undermining long-term sustainability.

Within this system, leather has suffered. With a few exceptions among technicians and managers, many workers have been pushed into undervalued roles. Their skills and craftsmanship are insufficiently recognised. Leather itself has too often succumbed to commoditisation, with some modern tanneries rushing hides and skins through processes, relying on heavy pigmentation and plastic finishes. Value, increasingly measured only by price, has overshadowed true quality, in both the material and the workforce.

If too much of the leather industry has chased efficiency while overlooking legitimacy, it has trapped itself between commodity and overpriced luxury. The question is how to recover?

As Michael Sandel might argue, we have avoided moral choices, leaving questions of which kinds of work deserve esteem, how capital should be allocated, what constitutes a good product to market and algorithms rather than democratic debate.

GDP-led growth continues to encourage overproduction, waste and environmental damage. It has also contributed to the erosion of meaning and civic legitimacy in economic life. The devaluation of “ordinary” work and the decline in the status of craft have caused real damage. What has been lost is not only material but symbolic: a shared understanding that skilled work contributes to the common good, not just the balance sheet.

For all its difficulties, the dirt, the smell, the complaints, the tannery was once a place of community. Wherever I have seen tanneries close at close hand, the sense of loss has extended far beyond the workforce to the wider communities of which they were part.

The failure of modern economic systems is not just environmental or industrial, it is civilisational. It is not only unsustainable in ecological terms, but also socially and morally unsustainable. Leather, in this context, becomes a case study of what has been lost and what could be rebuilt.

A different model

Efficiency without legitimacy must be challenged. In its place, leather can offer evidence of a different model: one based on longevity, care and circularity. Consumers can be helped to understand and appreciate true value. Value that supports civic flourishing, not just growth.

Leather belongs to a category of goods whose worth cannot be determined purely by market price. It carries identity, craft, longevity and environmental interconnection, aligning directly with Sandel’s argument that we must debate the moral meaning of goods.

GDP, for all its usefulness, does not account for household labour or voluntary work, nor does it capture environmental degradation or resource depletion. These omissions matter deeply for sustainability and long-term prosperity.

The World Economic Forum estimates that around half of global GDP is moderately or highly dependent on nature. The degradation of ecosystems therefore threatens not only biodiversity, but also supply chains, insurance systems and financial stability.

Longevity in leather matters as it answers some of these questions, as it reminds us that time matters. Cut down an entire forest and you immediately enhance GDP but cut down only part in a sustainable way and you gain more over time while maintaining the habitat, the soil security, the mycelium and more. And making leather matters as leather is a major provider of jobs and careers in many industries that are not threatened by robots, AI and the mental health problems that can come with endless computer work.

Vital, human-friendly, replaces plastics, nice to handle, look at and feel. Wears in rather than wears out and can be repaired. Immeasurable. Forget the metrics and fall in love with leather.

mike@internationalleathermaker.com

You can find Dr Mike Redwood across social media at @michaelredwood.

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