Mike Redwood
Columnist
International Leather Maker
In the UK and Ireland, we have a niche service retailer that specialises in shoe repairs, key cutting, engraving, watch repairs and dry cleaning. Timpson have more than 2,000 stores and are openly willing to provide employment to offenders when released from prison.
Currently, 12% of Timpson’s 4,500 workforce have a past criminal conviction, and the company is one of the largest employers of ex-offenders in the UK. The workforce includes people convicted of theft, drug offences, assault and even 16 people serving life sentences for murder who work on day release programmes. Timpson does not employ those convicted of sexual, racist, homophobic or terrorism-related offences.
The Timpson family was originally from Rothwell in Northamptonshire and have been continuously involved in shoe making and footwear repair since the 1840s, even battling through the difficult 1960s and 1970s. They settled on the business of footwear repair and key cutting and found that if managed carefully, it is one of low capital requirements and high margins. The current throwaway culture and enthusiasm for hard-to-repair sneakers means footwear repair is only a small part of their current business, but we should still see them as a vital element in the leather ecosystem. Particularly as all current trends point to the need for far more footwear repairs and as tanners pressure more footwear and leather goods makers to design for repair.
Working with offenders and offering a second chance is a a very relevant issue today as in most countries, re-offending rates are very high. The British Government has even persuaded one of the Timpson family to join their government to bring expertise to the area.
Equally, maintaining a high moral standard in business and government has become increasingly important as the latest decades of globalisation appears to have worsened corruption in most places. Both the U.S. and the UK have deteriorated recently, with Britain being called out for ongoing political scandals related to government officials and politicians, cash-for-access concerns and high-stakes lobbying by business. How did society reach this new low and what does it say about leather?
Diverse boardrooms
Corrupt behaviour is nothing new, but it has now even raised suspicions in the battle to save the Walsall Leather Museum, which I have recently written about. So much so, that there is a clear argument that everything must be brought to a stop until they get to the truth. Equally, the mistreatment of women is engrained in history, but to so often see flagrant breaches of any sense of proper behaviour in business and private life suggests some major failure.
It is well recognised that business and government require diverse company boards, including women, to perform at their best, yet progress has been slow. As I have written before, today’s leather industry is very dependent on women, but the balance towards the service companies and marketing is still too high. Their skills are badly needed in tannery boardrooms, wider tannery management and research.
In Britain, the Government produced a landmark policy document on a Violence Against Women and Girls Strategy in December 2025. It sets a primary goal to halve violence against women and girls within a decade. Clearly among those in business and leadership roles, there are many honest and good people determined to do the right thing.
Yet other senior people continue to believe that wealth, intelligence, or status reflects intrinsic worth and so makes it easy to discount harm being done to those with less power, and frequently others allow them to obfuscate their way out of misbehaviour, when Timpson’s requires evidence of acceptance of guilt and remedial steps to have been taken.
When I started working for a large company, there were certainly problems with long alcoholic lunches and late-night misbehaviour with a minority of top bosses. Those days died out and we were left with admirable leadership, so the leather industry of the 21st century must ensure that no executives see such misdemeanours as mere reputational inconvenience rather than the crossing of a moral boundary. Alongside this is a very hard reminder that we still have to do a great deal to eliminate casual misogyny in business and society.
Avoid failing the Timpson Test
For tanners, the message is clear: revamp your Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) training (even if you call it something else these days). The ancient leather livery of the City of London, Leathersellers, sits in a location loaded with elderly male attitudes, yet has one of the best records in the City. An event I attended last week demonstrated this with its youthful vibrancy, with many young women now fully involved. When I arrived an hour early, I found senior members exiting a DEI session and discussing at length the entry point teaching on unconscious bias. These then go further into gender awareness and identifying subtle “low-level” misogyny, such as interrupting women more frequently in meetings, “man-explaining”, or dismissive jokes masquerading as humour. Business still needs to confront the “Think Manager, Think Male” biases, where leadership traits are unconsciously associated with men and much more.
While misogyny and corruption have always been a problem, another element might be the newer forms of meritocracy that grew towards the end of the 20th century and into the 21st. The answer to deindustrialisation was better education, but from China to the much of the West, the emphasis was put on university degrees. This created a gulf between those who went to university and those who did not. New types of elites were created and large numbers of the rest felt discarded and that they were being prevented from sharing future prosperity.
The distance between public meritocratic narratives of open competition and transparent standards, and the reality of opaque deals and secret deals, is only deepening the sense of betrayal among those excluded. And as Timpson demonstrates, actual education for the modern world needs to be much more balanced. China is now battling to kill the culture that says only a degree qualification offers a route to a good job and to train more technical young people, and most of the West is pushing new apprenticeships.
The world does not need a new elite graduate class, creating an “unwanted underclass”. Many exam‑based meritocracies take a seemingly “objective” metric, embeds strong prior assumptions (unconscious biases) into it, and then uses it to legitimise new elites while marginalising everyone and everything that does not fit the metric’s frame.
The leather industry has long worried that this has downgraded apprenticeship and on-the-job training, which is essential in a craft-based industry working with a natural material, especially one suited for skilled repair. But parked in the shadow of meritocracy sits inequality of outcome for society which creates unrest and inequality of moral accountability.
The global demographic challenge also asks questions of us all. Women have been doing better than men at university and access to careers were supposed to be merit-based but in many countries, they are the ones expected to take on the entire problem of raising the birthrate. In China clearly, they are voting with their feet and not getting married because the promises made by partners to share the workload after childbirth are not being kept.
Leather is a perfect material in a world changing with globalisation, difficult demographic and climate developments. A world where more extraction will have to be replaced by greater stewardship of what we have. To even get near the starting line of letting leather create its proper success, women must be present in numbers and as equals. Tanners must play the fullest part possible in totally ending casual misogyny and the wicked networks of power, money and backscratching. Let us never forget the Timpson Test.
mike@internationalleathermaker.com
You can find Dr Mike Redwood across social media at @michaelredwood.
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