Dr Mike Redwood
I’ve just spent the morning talking to some very hairy cattle. There are a lot of them about, as this is a livestock community. In fact, it demonstrates in one short journey why the concept of replacing meat with vegetables, livestock with crops will never make sense.
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Dr Mike Redwood
I was told the other day that in some of the top London departmental stores more than half the footwear sold are trainers, or more precisely, sneakers. Toffler was right when he said that the “future happens faster than you expect, and in the wrong order” as it feels only yesterday when we had leather shoes and we had plimsolls with a green flash, and little else beyond Wellington boots and work boots.
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Dr Mike Redwood
When the inventor and entrepreneur James Dyson, of bagless cleaner fame, wrote that marketing begins deep inside the organisation, with the product, I cheered. One of the delights of being a marketer in the leather sector, initially trained and employed as a leather technician, is that I have always been involved in new product development.
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Dr Mike Redwood
“After 10,000 years of doing everything in an aqueous solution, do you think that the leather industry is really culturally able to discard water and replace it with plastic balls?” This was my final question to Vik Pratap of Xeros on April 21.
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Dr Mike Redwood
Every day we get another message about a material using the name of leather either inappropriately or illegally. Thankfully, many regional and national associations have taken up the challenge of fighting the misuse of nomenclature. In the past, they have often been unwilling to get entangled in such battles but this mentality now appears to have changed.
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Dr Mike Redwood
When the leather industry met for the World Leather Congress in Shanghai last year, it was made very clear by Stephen Sothmann, the President of the U.S. Hide, Skin and Leather Association (USHSLA), that no one in the U.S. leather industry value chain, from cattle to retail, wanted to get involved in tariffs.
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Dr Mike Redwood
In an entertaining little article in the Financial Times, design guru Stephen Bayley asked a simple question: “Does anyone remember driving gloves?”
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Dr Mike Redwood
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness.” Charles Dickens has got it about right for the leather industry as we head into Easter and the heart of 2018.
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Dr Mike Redwood
Tanners do not get to meet government ministers very often. When they do, they often find the politicians to be arrogant or ignorant, quite often both. By comparison, meeting His Excellency Dr. Arkebe Oqubay was a delight for all those who attended his press conference or his talk at APLF Hong Kong. He spoke with clarity about the business situation in Ethiopia, clearly understanding the global leather industry, and stepped forward afterwards happy to meet and talk to any interested individuals who wanted more information.
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Dr Mike Redwood
When the essay The Cathedral and the Bazaar appeared online back in the 1990s, Microsoft developers stopped work to read and absorb it. Top down, Microsoft style design was being compared with bottom up Linux design and being found wanting. It made it clear that the closed, “skunk works in a basement”, type of product innovation would lose its dominance.
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Dr Mike Redwood
With the trade fair season well under way, many in the industry are preparing to depart for Hong Kong to the sudden life or death, or something in between, three-day trade show that is APLF Leather & Materials+.
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Dr Mike Redwood
Two weeks ago, I was very impressed with the clarity of thought that came across from a group of students at the University of Northampton in the UK. Their understanding of what we were saying about responsible tanning and sustainability was apparent, as was their concern that in much of the world the leather industry had more to do to correct matters than we were suggesting.
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Dr Mike Redwood
When John Waterer wrote his famous little book Leather in Life, Art and Industry, his choice of title emphasised the central role leather had played in the evolution of society up to well into the twentieth century. Leather was such a perfect ‘natural wrapper’ for liquids, human bodies, valuables, that it was to be found in every aspect of the evolution of civilisation, ancient and modern.
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Dr Mike Redwood
They say that you never stop learning, and judging from a series of meetings I had last week it is very true. I have been fortunate to have visited tanneries far and wide around the world, of all types from quite primitive to very modern, over many years. What I sometimes fail to remind myself is that in recent years I have only been visiting some of the most modern and well managed plants. It is easy to come away with a view that the industry is uniformly excellent.
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Dr Mike Redwood
After a year of stock market calm, it is hard to ignore the sudden volatility of the past few days. It is a volatility heightened by the wide use of computerisation to take instant buy and sell decisions.
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Dr Mike Redwood
Standing at the edge of a football pitch talking about currency to a well known British tanner on a cold Friday January night is not something you would expect to do as a routine. This was, however, the “Glovers”; a team close to the bottom of English football’s lowest tier, Yeovil, who are affectionately known as ‘the Glovers’ since that has for centuries been the primary business in the town. In recognition of a historically important leather industry, there are other teams in England known as the 'Saddlers' and the 'Cobblers'.
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Dr Mike Redwood
The move in the last few days to transfer €3.5 billion worth of Puma shares from the Luxury Group Kering into the hands of the Puma shareholders, at a stroke reducing the Kering interest from about 86% down to 16%, has passed with little comment.
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Dr Mike Redwood
In last week’s ILM comment piece, I tried to explain how I thought that the new Chinese waste disposal regulations might work to change attitudes towards solid wastes and liquid effluent by leading to investment in more modern plants. Such a concept is, after all, the basis of most such legal frameworks around the world. If you want to stop or slow something happening, tax it.
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Dr Mike Redwood
No one should consider making leather if they are not sure that all wastes are being managed appropriately. There is enough knowledge and education for this to be quite clear. To support this around the world, environmental laws related to what can be disposed of as waste are mostly quite good. What is variable is compliance, and enforcement.
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Dr Mike Redwood
As we sign off 2017 and jump into 2018 it is appropriate to both reflect upon and to preview the past and current years. Amid a noisy backdrop of concern about raw material prices, market weakness, currency fluctuations and competitors that ignore the laws on nomenclature one theme stands out as being important in both years.
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Dr Mike Redwood
One of the most overused words of the last few years must be networking. It is one of those weasel words that is used loosely to describe connections of all sorts. I became involved when I used business networks in history as the basis of my Ph.D. and the work required to define the term for valid research purposes was immense.
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Dr Mike Redwood
The log fire in the Oak Hall in West Dean is permanently lit. Outside, it’s been below zero for the last few days and we have a group gathered together from all over Europe, plus Canada and The Middle East, spending a week learning about Leather Conservation. We are with the staff from the Leather Conservation Centre in an ancient country estate near Chichester in the south of England, now dedicated to the teaching of traditional crafts and conservation.
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Dr Mike Redwood
The funeral of Philip Rothwell on December 4 was a stark reminder of the role of friendship in a relatively small, self-contained industry such as ours. George Donath, who was his first manager at Stahl GB, which he joined in late 1965, and Tim Amos who took over Stahl India from him when he retired in 2003, both spoke movingly about Philip.
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Dr Mike Redwood
At the recent Leather & Sustainability in Retail conference which ILM and BLC co-hosted in London on November 16, one of the delegates was quoted “we would like to see much greater levels of transparency from our suppliers (tanners) in terms of the chemicals used in the manufacture of leather. The industry falls behind other industries, such as the cosmetics sector for example, where there is much more openness about what is contained in each product.”
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Dr Mike Redwood
We live in a digital world, and are reminded of this continuously. Yet we recognise that, to access most leaders of our top companies, traditional media remains vital. Board rooms still receive physical copies of the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times, and many our leather trade journals remain in mostly physical form.
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Dr Mike Redwood
Normally these days, clever acquisitions are mostly talked about when made by the Internet giants. It feels that the regular world of market competition has been hijacked by the dominance of scale. Equally we talk interminably that innovation is only about utterly new product whereas today it is a complex subject often encompassing the old, updated and adapted for modern times. We talk of waterproof, perspiration and abrasion resistance but forget that it is in the nuances that often the greatest impact is achieved; and that it is as often about process as it is product, with the marketplace today requiring both as a routine.
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Dr Mike Redwood
As consumers move relentlessly from buying things to paying for experiences, one thing I expect to start doing well is Sleeper trains, certainly in Europe. A couple of years ago this suggestion would have been laughable as it looked as though their time was over. Yet, I am writing this in the dining lounge of a sleeper train heading from London to the north of Scotland. After supper and a taste or two of whisky with friends, I will retire and return in the morning for breakfast as we hurry through the Scottish highland scenery as dawn is breaking.
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Dr Mike Redwood
What makes a luxury? This was a discussion I had yesterday (October 31) with some brilliant students in the ancient southern English town of Winchester. This is where The University of Southampton run their world leading Masters Course on Luxury Brand Management, and this is the third year I have been privileged to talk to them.
Read more...A comment from Sarie de Wet, Account Manager, Klein Karoo a South Africa based processor of ostrich. The article is in response to Mike Redwood’s comment published on this website on October 12. Click here to read the original article.
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Dr Mike Redwood
As I write this, I am floating away from Budapest. We are recreating a trip done by Jason and the Argonauts with the Golden Fleece (a sheepskin used to collect gold from a river bed in northwest Georgia) as he sailed up the Danube to Vienna: a trip up the Danube from the Black Sea done by many others - Huns, Magyars, Ottomans - mostly with all conquering intent, over the last 2000 years.
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Mike Redwood
“I have beef cattle that I keep out on grass all year, and eating grass the way they do, I do not believe the published figures for methane production are true at all. I think (those opposed to meat and leather) estimate them from laboratory studies and then multiply them up by weight, so the numbers are totally inaccurate.” It was Tuesday, and I was talking to the owner of a small European tannery. Not someone to be fooled with lightly, but someone whose decisions on leather making were markedly deliberate and well thought through. He was clear that attacks being made against leather lacked proper scientific evidence. Too much was based on small studies that were generalised and misquoted.
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Dr Mike Redwood
All tanners have a little collection of interesting leather samples. Often, we use these to illustrate talks about leather to external bodies like schools and fashion and design students. It has always been interesting to note the excitement of everyone at handling leather made out of camel, horse, yak and the like.
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Dr Mike Redwood
Last week I went into a Tesla showroom in a shopping centre in Cambridge with a retired colleague who spent most of his career with Stahl. Both Tesla S and an X models were on show along with a neat wall display of all the interior materials, carefully laid out in a way that you could not see a cut edge. A very sharp young man tried to sell us a car and was doing well until we asked him about the material for the seats. “Synthetic leather” was his reply.
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Dr Mike Redwood
I always like to carry a tanner’s magnifying glass, and have a collection to choose from that go back to the days when chemical companies used to hand them out as gifts. One from Rohm & Haas remains a favourite, although the US$15 add-on lenses for an iPhone do give exceptional results that are easier to share with colleagues.
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Dr Mike Redwood
With attacks coming thick and fast against the leather industry from all sides, the quiet complacency which characterised the leather industry five years ago has now gone and is being replaced by an increasing outcry that was clearly visible at the recent World Leather Congress in Shanghai on August 29.
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Dr Mike Redwood
I’ve been a subscriber of the Economist magazine since 1971, and I last had a letter published in it around 1973. I have no idea what it was about but I do remember using the word “struthiocameline” (head in the sand), a weird word that was used quite a bit in the 1960s and 70s.
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Dr Mike Redwood
During the World Leather Congress last week (August 29) I was asked to chair, or moderate, the final session and subsequent discussion panel. It was entitled ‘The Tanners Response’ and included a couple of globally respected tanners plus representatives from ZDHC, who are increasingly being seen as well aligned to the leather industry and Lanxess. The session was to end with a discussion for which two others took the stage.
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WLC ‘The New Consumer’ discussion panel
The organisers were rather taken aback at the third World Leather Congress held in Shanghai on August 29. They had expected three or four hundred delegates but ended up with bookings for seven hundred and fifty, creating problems with the seating and the eating logistics.
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Dr Mike Redwood
This time next week I should be writing from the World Leather Congress (WLC) in Shanghai, which means that for many of us the holiday period is over and we are looking forward to being pitched back into the maelstrom of the leather industry. I will be talking briefly about how marketing has evolved and how the volatility around us means that it is harder to pre-determine marketing strategies and most top marketers now develop programmes that are suited to being adapted as they go along.
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Uncertainty is one of the defining features of the world today, whether it concerns the consequences of Brexit, the impact of climate change or our security in an increasingly volatile political environment. Uncertainty can cause those affected to struggle to take action or to become excessively risk-averse. Uncertainty can also lead to speculation, which, in the absence of other views or evidence, can further limit the ability of those affected to act.
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Dr Mike Redwood
I did not know until a few days ago that India had a milkman, never mind that the Milkman of India was Dr Verghese Kurien (1921-2012) who with his Billion Litre Idea and Operation Flood transformed the Indian milk industry. In so doing he aided the improvement in health of the nation, the status and income of many of the poorest farmers and the empowerment of women.
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Dr Mike Redwood
There have been a number comments from people in the leather supply chain since I wrote a few weeks ago that chromium tanning is in permanent decline (click here to recap). This was based on the fact that the crescendo of attacks being made against it have gone on so long and been so loud that user opinion can no longer be retrieved however hard the industry tries.
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Mike Redwood
The improving understanding of marketing that is taking place in the leather industry comes in part from the fact that tanners have become much more involved in working with the full value chain. They have started to realise that for everyone in that complex network to make a profit the final consumer has to see the value in the product they are buying.
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Mike Redwood
Hanging prominently on the wall of the main staircase of the Lairgate Hotel in Beverley, East Yorkshire, England is a portrait of George Odey CBE (1900 – 1985). The portrait is by the Royal portrait painter Norman Hepple and was painted in 1973.
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Redwood Comment
A few weeks ago, I ran a three-day course on branding in the leather industry at Northampton University. During the course, a couple of colleagues from some big brands, one leather goods and one footwear, were called in to talk to the students. In quite separate presentations on different days, both made the point that while they understood the science and technology that supports chromium as a first-rate tanning method they thought there was already too much momentum behind the chrome-free movement for it to be stopped.
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Mike Redwood
We are beginning to see news about the upcoming World Leather Congress to be held next month in Shanghai, the day before the All China Leather Exhibition begins. It looks like being a very good event, and I hope it sees a good attendance from both Chinese and international tanners and industry associates.
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Mike Redwood
The announcement in the last few days that the UK shoemaker Clarks will restart making its iconic desert boot at its headquarters located in the town of Street, Somerset, is a big issue by any definition. In rough terms, Clarks sell about 50 million pairs of shoes around the world each year so 300,000 pairs of desert boots is not a lot; but it is a significant production and does need a proper infrastructure putting into place. Buyers will be queuing up for these shoes, and I will be at the head of the queue.
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As an industry, we get quite excited about the automobile and the leather goods aspects of our business and this is where the growth has been in recent years. All through the past hundred years, footwear has been far bigger and even the most pessimistic view of what has been happening in the past few years still has footwear using about twice the volume of leather as the two other sectors added together.
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Mike Redwood
It has always disappointed me to see a small company decide to close down. Certainly, there is a time to live and a time to die for a business and not all businesses are set to survive through endless decades. When I began in industry an S&P 500 company had an average life of about 60 years, while now it is down closer to 17.
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Mike Redwood
Have you read Diana Kander’s digital article “Help Your Team Stop Overcommitting by Empowering Them to Say No” about how we all say yes too easily to attending meetings, events and conferences when really our work, our family lives and our whole personal well-being would improve if we just said no? Lucy Kellaway featured this point in a recent article in the Financial Times, which stood out amid the current global turmoil.
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