Dr Mike Redwood
Leather making is difficult. What we are doing is “conditioning” a natural material to stabilise the structure against bacteria and adjust it to perfectly serve its required end use.
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Dr Mike Redwood
There is no doubt that a new impetus has been needed in the leather industry that must be built around the two fundamentals of marketing and innovation. What is more, neither can be quiet, incremental and merely involve more of the same as in the past.
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Dr Mike Redwood
Liverpool needs little introduction with its top football team returning to prominence in the last few seasons. It has many other reasons to be famous from the Beatles to waterside buildings exactly like the Shanghai Bund, which serve to remind us what an important global shipping centre it has been for centuries.
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Picture credit: Vincent Delegge
Lately, and all too frequently, it has become commonplace for mainstream as well as social media reports to lay into the leather industry, elements of its supply chain and processes, or the wider meat sector as a whole. Leather is under attack, and leather makers and finished goods producers are increasingly on the backfoot, having to constantly defend themselves and their industry from mistruths and negative, anti-leather propaganda.
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Picture credit: Stefan Widua
In 2013 two significant books were published about the growth in world population with 10 Billion prominent in the title. One was by Danny Dorling, a geography Professor, and the other by Stephen Emmott, another celebrated scientist who advises governments and in 2013 was Head of Computational Science at Microsoft Research.
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Dr Mike Redwood
Modern geopolitics has become a major influence on the leather industry in a way that is unusual outside of war, albeit, it was the slower application of geopolitical trends that pushed leather making out of the more advanced economies and into the emerging markets.
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Credit: Sam Carter
Concerns around animal welfare as well as ethical considerations are the driving motif behind the vegan movement amid a wider environmental agenda and pursuit of a greener lifestyle.
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Credit: Eccofinishing
An overview of the raw materials market trends following the ACLE in Shanghai, September 3-5 and the outlook over the coming weeks as the industry prepares for Lineapelle in Milan and the next buying season. Overview written by a Market Analyst at theSauerReport.com
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Dr Mike Redwood
What is the takeaway from a week in Shanghai? In simple terms, it is make relevant leathers and tell a good story. Be sure you have an honest sustainability story, that your processing is responsible, that your management of all wastes is comprehensive and honest and you treat your workforce fairly. If you miss these points, you are not at the party. Others will beat you, and some of those others will not be leather.
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Dr Mike Redwood
It is a wet Monday and we are drinking tea in a hotel lobby in Shanghai to keep warm. Typical really as we stole the (rather dishonest) tea producing process out of China so we could do it in India and now the U.S. is putting tariffs everywhere to stop China stealing intellectual property. The tea heist back in 1848 was carried out by Scotsman, Robert Fortune, dressed as a Mandarin. Today’s activities are apparently full frontal but in everything today the black arts of cybercrime and straightforward political double speak play a big role.
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Dr Mike Redwood
Whatever definition of marketing you use, and the leather industry has a poor record at definitions, it was not leather industry marketing that caused the global financial crash in 2007 nor pushed hide prices over US$100 a hide a couple of years ago. On the other hand, it was a clear industry failure to grasp even the fundamentals of marketing that has meant there has been so much surprise that leather has not seen a rebound in market share since hide prices started collapsing.
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Mike Redwood
“And finally this century is nearly two decades old, and if you look around the innovation that our customers are seeing has come more from the alternatives than it has from leather.”
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Agha Saiddain
Agha Saiddain, Marketing Director of Pakistan based tanners, Royal Leather Industries located in Lahore and the current Chairman of the Pakistan Tanners’ Association (PTA) Central section, has presented his thoughts to ILM around some of the untruths and misconceptions around leather and leather products in the current market. He urges the tanning industry to work together to fight on common ground.
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The idea of mapping out positioning in the marketplace using Perceptual Maps started about forty years ago and is a useful tool to help visualise what is occurring.
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Dr Mike Redwood
I was upset last week when I was directed to an item on the Dezeen website where the head of Helsinki Fashion Week was talking provocatively about farming leather. I promptly responded in the abyss of the “comments” section which never gets read. I suppose it relieves the upset at seeing more malevolent abuse of facts.
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Dr Mike Redwood
Last week we saw a welcome but rather unexpected move by the China Leather Industry Association (CLIA) to stop the confusing marketing that arises from the historic usage of the meaningless term “synthetic leather”. It is something that has infuriated the industry as they travel around the globe to leather shows where leather sits alongside other materials to help buyers who want to make their international visits more efficient.
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Dr Mike Redwood
A year or two ago I wrote here that some of the most senior leather buyers from major corporations were convinced that chrome tanned leather, despite being technically superior and environmentally quite satisfactory, would not survive the next few years.
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Dr Mike Redwood
New York began as a trading post to send hides and skins back to Europe. Soon leather was needed to supply the needs of arriving settlers, so the direction of the leather trade started to reverse and leather production became a major US industry.
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Credit: Juliana Amorim
In the Autumn of 2018 National Geographic magazine took a look at the prospects for the Amazon forest amid the political upheaval in Brazil. It did look good.
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Dr Mike Redwood
The fact that hides and skins are not reaching the tannery but are being discarded to landfill is a failure in the leather industry. All through the 20th century we said that the volume of leather is totally dependent upon the size of the kill created for meat and dairy purposes as no economics could ever permit keeping livestock for leather.
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Isabella Griffiths
Consumer interest in all things vegan and eco-friendly is growing. Whether you consider it a fad or the Zeitgeist of our time, it certainly looks like it is a trend that is here to stay. I do not need to tell you that the leather industry has been hugely affected, if not damaged, by this development – mostly, it seems, because of its own passivity and inability to (re)act and to defend its place in the market.
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Dr Mike Redwood
The European Sports Show ISPO recently produced a well written article about the German footwear leather tannery Josef Heinen Leather. As the Leather Naturally campaign is about to kick off, it is important that we remember that every organisation, tannery and individual has to keep on playing their part.
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Dr Mike Redwood
Gideon Lee was one of the most famous people in New York; Mayor between 1933-34, and with a big house at 37 Frankfort Street - the same street where Schultz and Kuttner later plotted the concept of chrome tanning over lunch in Racky’s restaurant. Born in Massachusetts he moved to New York to become a leather merchant and, after some success, in 1817 he started a joint stock company in the U.S. to tan leather. The New York Tannery was built in the Catskills and was the first covered tannery to be built in the U.S..
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Dr Mike Redwood
As tanneries steadily upgraded their wet ends last century, introducing larger drums with mechanical handling of hides and controlled additions of chemicals and water, along with modernised set ups for fleshing and splitting, the labour content dropped considerably. I first recognised this when given charge of a brand-new tannery in El Salvador in the 1970s, and looking at the costings we recognised how the labour element changed as you moved through the tannery.
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Dr Mike Redwood
I am very much looking forward to hearing Frank Mitloehner speak at the 4th World Leather Congress in New York this July. He was one of the first to challenge the FAO Livestock’s Long Shadow Report, which still haunts the livestock and leather industry despite being written back in 2006 and full of very obvious errors.
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Dr Mike Redwood
If you listen to my wife, we would still be living in El Salvador, despite the fact that we worked there over forty years ago. At that time I was managing the tannery for the shoe company ADOC. We left because the beginnings of the long civil war were starting to make life both difficult and dangerous for all the family, as curfews, bombs and kidnappings made their impact on everyday life.
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Dr Mike Redwood
Being in the UK right now is difficult. It is not so much that the nation does not seem able to manage leaving Europe, which after all is little more than the complexity of a very divided country, but rather the comprehensive lack of vision coming from any quarter regarding the future role of Britain in the world.
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Dr Mike Redwood
Demographic changes impact business networks in different and complex ways, and the leather industry has never been immune. It is acutely affected by geopolitical and macro-economic developments.
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Dr Mike Redwood
For something like the last twenty-five years, huge numbers of the world’s citizens – we talk of them as consumers – have lived in an economic environment of low interest rates. Their governments have kept interest rates low to encourage consumers to borrow and then to spend, because in economies that have moved strongly towards services, consumer spending is important.
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Isabella Griffiths
Having recently joined the ILM team and the leather industry from the fashion and retail sector, where I was Editor of a leading b2b magazine, I have been eager to learn about the leather trade, including the challenges it faces and opportunities ahead. It’s quite apparent that there are many parallels between the key issues in both sectors.
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Dr Mike Redwood
Was the leather industry disrupted when chrome tanning began to spread in the early twentieth century? Was it disrupted when the footwear, garment and glove business started to grow in Korea and Taiwan in the 1960s, or in China in the 1990s? Was it a disruption when sole leather was replaced by rubber and plastic, or the sneaker moved beyond being a tennis shoe into everyday wear? Or how about when we stopped riding horses and started going in buses and automobiles.
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Dr Mike Redwood
Urbanisation has now been widely recognised by all in business and politics as a longstanding major trend and is often used in a general way to pretend an awareness of the realities of the world we live in. Like globalisation and sustainability, it is loosely defined and open to manipulation in ways more sinister than merely to offer respectability for doubtful arguments.
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Dr Mike Redwood
I learned recently that the leather industry sorted out its definition of leather back in 1978 at an International Council of Tanners meeting in Buenos Aires. It now exists, more or less unchanged, as EN15987:2015 and is to be found in the International Council of Tanners Glossary (ICT), in much the same form as the old UK BS standard I have often discussed.
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Dr Mike Redwood
“Regardless of how much steak you eat, the world is not going to run out of water”. This quote comes from Dr. Judith Thornton, the Low Carbon Manager (BEACON) at Aberystwyth University. Previously, she researched water footprinting and water efficiency at Leeds University and has held many significant positions in the Environmental sector in Europe.
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Dr Mike Redwood
Networking is mostly considered as something to be done with a wineglass in hand and a clutch of name cards. It is viewed as about job hunting through building relationships with senior people in the sectors where they want to work.
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Image credit: Samuel Scrimsh
Co-written by Daniel Natusch a practicing Research Scientist and Conservation Biologist; Grahame Webb, Chair of the IUCN-SSC Crocodile Specialist Group, and a member of the IUCN Sustainable Use and Livelihoods Specialist Group and Rick Shine, Ecologist and Conservation Biologist and a Professor in Biology at Macquarie University. The article was first published on the website, The Conversation, with permission to republish on the ILM website.
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Dr Mike Redwood
If there is ever a time to change the narrative about leather it is now. Throughout the 20th century, leather was something that tanners produced and sales staff sold.
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Dr Mike Redwood
After years of watching growing collaboration and convergence around the world, I have returned from the Asia Pacific Leather Fair (APLF) with a new word on top of mind: conflict. It was raised first by Ralph Goodstone, the Vice Chair of the Ethical Fashion Forum, at the Sustainable Fashion Conference APLF Workshop which hid itself away in a far corner of Hall 3F.
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Dr Michael Redwood
This feels like one of the most important Hong Kong Asia Pacific Leather Fairs we have ever had, which is a profound comment given the significance of APLF in guiding the leather industry towards China in the late 20th century. But, with some raw material being valued at less than US$0.30 per piece and others as “worthless” according to a recent webinar podcast, leather is challenged today like never before. It will be a hectic and worrisome week.
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Dr Mike Redwood
After Lineapelle there were mixed views about the state of trade. While everyone thought things were poor there were those who viewed the downturn as merely a cyclical matter, while others saw it as a more permanent structural change.
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Dr Mike Redwood
When many people talk about the Circular Economy they think only of end of life. Then how an article can be broken into technical and organic elements to be fully re-utilised, rather than disposed of or recycled into some sub-optimal use.
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Dr Mike Redwood
An industry regulator in the EU awarded a buyer of a used Mercedes sizeable compensation for buying a car advertised as upholstered in leather, when in fact it was largely a PU coated textile of some sort. There were a couple of disappointing elements involved.
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Dr Mike Redwood
It is twenty-seven years since the late Dr Robert Sykes retired. He died last October at the age of 89 and was remembered on February 11 at a luncheon in London. He started his studies in leather at Leeds University around 1947 and graduated after a PhD in the early 1950s. He went to work in Africa and then returned to the UK and became head of Science at Leathersellers College in London.
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Dr Mike Redwood
Although it is only a couple of weeks on, we need to consider the dietary attacks against livestock once more. In the UK, the vegan community promoted a vegan January and have quickly evolved this into a push for a dairy-free February. This includes a campaign element where they have published on line a list of dairy farms where they want people to go and demonstrate against keeping animals, and to try and photograph animals being mismanaged.
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Dr Mike Redwood
How about a treasure hunt? What we are looking for is the technological and engineering core of the leather industry. Where can we find it? It used to be in the hands of tanners and their colleagues. Schultz working in New York with Booths on chromium, Turney Wood scurrying around with dog faeces in his tannery in Nottingham, England looking for pancreatic enzymes.
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Dr Mike Redwood
This is the week of Davos when the great and the good attend the World Economic Forum to resolve the world’s problems in the luxurious Swiss setting. There are a few to sort out.
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Dr Mike Redwood
Fifty years ago, there were too many tanneries. Overcapacity was the major underlying problem of the leather industry, and it was a major reason why tanneries had low margins. The situation got worse as new tanneries were built in emerging areas, faster than old ones closed in the developed world.
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Dr Mike Redwood
When Leather Naturally first argued that we needed to promote leather and fight off the pretender materials with their misrepresentation we were told that leather was too unique to be involved. Every hide and skin available was available and used and “marketing” would only upset the delicate pricing structure in an a curious “closed” market.
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Dr Mike Redwood
Buying and selling companies for billions of dollars has become commonplace, often creating massive concentration and oligopoly in markets. When LVMH spends over US$3 billion for a train and hotel business, first established with the visionary purchase of a loss-making hotel and a couple of old train carriages, even the leather industry needs to look up.
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Dr Mike Redwood
We are in the last days of a momentous year. For the first time, the industry has openly acknowledged that selling leather was difficult. It is no longer a given that every hide and skin collected will be made into leather.… and it will sell.
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