Thinking big in the leather industry

Mike Redwood

Columnist

International Leather Maker

I was travelling in the late 1980s, so I found out I was being promoted into a Sales and Marketing role through reading the appointments in the Financial Times (those days they routinely published for publicly traded companies). I did have some inkling that this was afoot as my company reorganised after a large acquisition, but I had hoped to have a chance to talk through details before accepting.

I would have wanted to say that I am not a salesman. I like strategic marketing and some of the creative aspects of communications but not selling. Although our turnover was close on £150 million (US$202.13 million), I never gave myself a salesman’s number needed to enter an order. I considered my role to be creating the long-term situation where excellent sales staff could complete that task and build the day-to-day communications involved in supply and delivery.

Whether it was dealing with a brand in the U.S. or a maker in Asia, any supplier who wants more than a single order must find their correct place in a structure that goes far beyond matching a product and offering it a little cheaper. Building trust is a multi-year exercise everywhere in the world. It is well known in Asia that “yes” does not signify any final agreement and time spent “getting to know each other”, socialising out of work, is required. Equally in the U.S., buyers in the 1980s had often never bought leather from sources more than 100 miles away, so they required a year or two to build trust and be assured of reliable quality, even when growth demanded additional suppliers.

Customers enjoy engaging

One aspect of working with all parts of the world is context. To look out at the wider world and see where your future customer fits in. Not just studying your ability to equal competitors’ products, but understanding their customers, their market and where your leather might give them extra leverage. As many readers will know, at the right level, your customers will enjoy engaging in such conversations when they realise you are seriously interested. Even today, I enjoy calls and messages from some of them wanting to exchange ideas.

For marketers, the starting point of all this is the macro environmental analysis, a way of looking at all the major issues from the outside world that impact a firm, often best studied by seeing a business as a unit within an extended network. This helps understanding how the impact price rises, how exchange rates move, or how changing consumer attitudes will work through to your tannery.

The business studies experts will introduce the PESTEL; a term worth remembering. It is a useful umbrella for checking all the areas that matter – Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Environmental and Legal. Thirty years ago, the centre of the global economy was moving eastwards to Asia and the customers for leather were doing so in pursuit of cheap labour in quite a rush. This was the moment when free markets and globalisation were considered a good thing, a time when politics and economics were separate. Strong trade ties with partners would ensure peace and steady moves towards more liberal democracies.

These fundamentals are no longer true. The Macro Environmental Analysis, always important, is impacting the greater leather network in every corner and every way. I honed my skill with it from Don Roberto Palomo, who started the ADOC shoe factory in 1953 in El Salvador. Working there in the 1970s, I watched him quietly extract the thoughts of many senior foreign visitors on all matters of the hide, leather, footwear, trade and political world. The conversations were exquisite and utterly fascinating, and vital for anyone in Central America struggling to avoid Civil Wars while the U.S. watched, likely to interfere. Decades after, when I returned on holiday, he always made sure to quiz me in just the same way. When teaching marketing at the University of Bath in my retirement, I would show a picture of him as someone untroubled by the initials PESTEL, as he understood every iota of its importance from his core as a business leader.

Politics and economics

Today, politics and economics have become intricately intertwined, making life harder for an industry like leather that has traded from the start of history. Social and environmental aspects have been placed by some in a ‘woke’ bucket community, regeneration and circularity are foundations of leather’s potential renaissance and legal has shifted from 500 years of legislation on how leather should be made – a year in the pit, regulated chemicals and controlled waste – to double edged tools like Europe’s forest legislation or California’s CrVI limits which defy good science only to make a point.

Leather was once a strategic material, and free trade meant that apart from the environmental costs of transportation, long supply chains were manageable. But as power politics play manufacturing choke points controlled by China against economic and financial hegemony from the U.S., nothing is predictable. Hides, leather and the products produced carry no clout. The Indian leather industry has been shocked into holding special meetings to look at managing its totally changed status. In the U.S., the LHCA has had to play the ballerina in its communications to try keep all the balls in the air. Even the first 14 days of 2026 have changed the global picture.

At Bath University I remember one senior banking executive on the MBA telling the class that he was required to present an updated PESTEL analysis to the group CEO once a month, and this would have been about the frequency of Don Roberto’s less formal, but just as thorough approach.

For all such considerations, where shocks can come out of the blue from anywhere in the world, you should ensure that you are looking at a very wide business environment indeed. Ignore this at your peril. As Hemingway wrote in 1926: “How did you go bankrupt? Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”

mike@internationalleathermaker.com

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

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