Pride of place

Mike Redwood

Columnist

International Leather Maker

Li Shufu, Founder of Geely Holdings, who own Volvo, Polestar, Lotus, Zeekr and Lynk, was recently quoted on a trip to Europe: “Globalisation has come to an end while we see the trend of economic regionalisation”. It is a trend that the leather industry needs to consider as part of the process of getting nearer to 100% of hides and skins, including more pigskins, back into the leather system.

The renewed interest in onshoring, driven by geopolitical instability, supply‑chain disruption and environmental scrutiny, is often framed too narrowly. It is typically treated as a simple question of relocating production—bringing factories back within national borders. Yet this view risks misunderstanding both the nature of modern industry and the conditions under which it can thrive.

Onshoring should instead be understood as the reconstruction of regional industrial systems. Drawing on Alfred Marshall’s concept of industrial districts and contemporary interpretations of cities as distributed metropolitan regions, we can forge a powerful framework centred on pride of place—a means to re‑embed industries such as leather within coherent, resilient and legitimate economic landscapes.

For much of the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries, industrial organisation followed a logic of global optimisation. Production was fragmented across borders, each stage located where costs were lowest or scale efficiencies greatest. Supply chains lengthened and became more complex, detached from any single geographic or cultural context. Everything was related to reducing costs and maximising profits.

This model delivered lower prices and greater output but at the cost of transparency, resilience and local capability. For the leather industry, entire ecosystems of skills and knowledge were lost, leaving only a few regions—such as in France, Italy and southern India—fighting to preserve coherence within the leather trade.

Recent shocks, including the pandemic, trade tensions and geopolitical conflicts, have exposed these vulnerabilities. In response, resilience, traceability and strategic autonomy have risen to the forefront of industrial policy. Yet the answer cannot simply be to reverse globalisation by relocating isolated production units. The deeper challenge is to rebuild the systems of place that make production viable and meaningful.

The Marshallian Insight: Industry as a local system

Alfred Marshall’s understanding of industrial districts provides a crucial insight: industries do not operate as isolated firms but as localised systems of interdependent activity. Within these districts, specialised firms cluster geographically; skilled labour circulates within a shared pool; and knowledge passes informally as well as formally between participants. Supporting services and institutions co‑evolve with production.

These “external economies” mean that each firm’s productivity depends on the strength of the wider system. When such systems are disrupted—through offshoring, fragmentation or institutional decline—the capabilities they sustain can erode quickly.

The systemic nature of the leather industry illustrates this clearly. The transformation from raw hide to finished product involves multiple stages—beamhouse operations, tanning, finishing, cutting and manufacturing—each requiring distinct skills, infrastructure and environmental conditions. Historically, these stages were distributed across a regional network of specialised sites, as still seen today in Tuscany, which has fought hard to retain its position.

The metropolitan region

Contemporary geography reinforces and extends Marshall’s insight. Rather than viewing cities as bounded administrative units, they are better understood as connected metropolitan regions—polycentric systems encompassing towns, rural areas and functional zones. These regions are internally specialised and linked through flows of labour, materials and knowledge. High‑speed rail and advanced communication have made such distributed regions increasingly viable, as demonstrated around Tokyo, Paris and Shanghai.

This perspective aligns with modern production realities. A viable industrial system does not require every activity to occur in one place; it depends on functional integration across a landscape.

For the leather sector, this implies a model in which rural hinterlands supply raw materials; water‑rich areas with space to host tanning and bioremediation processes; skilled towns focus on finishing and component production; craft centres create final goods such as footwear or saddlery; while urban hubs provide branding, finance and market connectivity. Wherever possible, design should remain closely tied to the makers. The result is not a single site, but a regionally distributed yet coherent system.

Pride of place: Beyond resilience to legitimacy

“Pride of place” captures the deeper significance of this regional approach. It operates on three levels. First, with shorter, regionally embedded supply chains to reduce exposure to global disruption and geopolitical risk. Not just hides and skins, but would it not be good to see more coppiced tree plantations producing tanbark once again? Second, localised production improves transparency in environmental and labour practices, allowing credible verification and accountability. Third, production rooted in place carries cultural and social meaning, reflecting skills, traditions and relationships that cannot be easily replicated elsewhere.

“Pride of place” is not nostalgic. It recognises that economic value increasingly depends on trust, traceability and authenticity—all grounded in identifiable places.

The leather industry demonstrates these dynamics vividly. It is materially intensive, environmentally sensitive and dependent on tacit knowledge and skilled labour. Efforts to make leather production “placeless” have brought environmental and reputational challenges, fragmented supply chains, and the loss of a coherent industrial identity. The product itself, our “leather”, has shifted from hero to a unit of production: a commodity.

Rebuilding a Marshallian leather region would mean reintegrating production stages within a connected hinterland: encouraging tanners to work with local livestock, making use of regionally available hides and byproducts, and investing in shared infrastructure such as water treatment, gelatine and collagen facilities. It would also involve revitalising skills through apprenticeships and strengthening institutions for training, research, regulatory support and knowledge management. The goal is not to recreate the past but to adapt its logic to contemporary conditions.

Implications for onshoring policy

Reframing onshoring in Marshallian and metropolitan terms has several policy implications, particularly for the many towns and cities—such as those emerging across Africa—looking to revitalise or build a leather economy.

Policy should support networks of interdependent firms rather than isolated investments. Planning and infrastructure must operate at a regional scale. The priority shifts from purely minimising costs toward sustaining skills, knowledge and resilience. Economic performance should be evaluated alongside environmental and social legitimacy.

This approach avoids both the impracticality of full vertical integration and the fragility of fragmented localisation. The current push toward onshoring reflects a broader reassessment of how production is organised in an uncertain world. Pride of place expresses this shift not as a retreat from globalisation, but as a move toward re‑embedded, regionally coherent industrial systems.

By combining Marshall’s insights with a modern understanding of metropolitan regions, we can see that the future of industries such as leather lies not in isolated factories, but in integrated landscapes of production.

Around the world, we have many centres that would like to see revitalisation, renewal or future leather industries. This sort of thinking works better than building one single industrial park, good as they can be, and will be more enduring and embedded in the community.

mike@internationalleathermaker.com

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

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