February 18, 2025

Growth is a double-edged sword

Emerging economies such as India and Ethiopia with growing populations must create employment for all the new entrants to the workforce. Additionally, all countries seek economic expansion which adds further requirements for new jobs.

For India 12 million (and Ethiopia 3 million) such jobs are needed annually to deliver all this via GDP growth of around 7%. For large economies like China and the U.S. with more maturing populations, economic growth is most important. China needs about 6 million and the U.S. needs 2.5 million new jobs per annum for GDP growth nearer 4%.

Consumer spending has done great harm

At the other end of this plan, a lot of GDP growth comes from consumer spending, and is increasingly significant in China where construction and exports have slowed.

Since the advent of modern branding in the 1980s and the Internet in the 2000s, pushing for more consumer spending has done increasing harm to the leather industry. Powerful brand promotion, low interest rates plus government encouragement to borrow to spend, followed by the power of social media have combined to transform consumers from thoughtful purchasers who saved before spending into impulse buyers who are quite happy to borrow.

The quick and easy purchase of cheap things that can be thoughtlessly discarded has become the norm. The motives with clothing and fashion are varied. To keep and wear perhaps, but often for single use at a party or on a social media post. Jokes about how many washes garments can withstands abound. Washing garments has anyway become a planetary threat; it is a major source of microplastics.

With this transformation of purchasing from the classic traditional model of consideration, research and careful choice to the sudden emotionally powered acquisition has changed the generations. Not just the idea of saving and spending but simple things like laundry, ironing (who still uses an ironing board?), stain removal and repair have slipped with amazing speed into history. It is hard to accept that we are too busy to even polish our shoes if the hours spent on social media are to be believed.

Growth at the target levels previously mentioned are hard to imagine in the leather industry. Here growth is decided by raw material supply – a 1 to 1.5% per annum exercise at best. The recent pronouncements that 30% of hides no longer get to the tannery each year implies levels of “de-growth” that must be creating redundant capacity. Many readers will be assessing this for themselves shortly in the corridors of Lineapelle.

The campaign to change the consumer is a long and hard one, but essential. It has been started and is making a difference. It needs to find its way to a wider circle beyond the current interested stakeholders. Finding growth goes beyond the consumer and the industry unity that produced a unified voice with documents like the Leather Manifesto has yet to achieve the levels of collaboration needed to create a blueprint for growth.

Our big customers may be worried, but not too much, as they have alternates in other materials and synthetics. This is why they have largely been unwilling to join leather in a survive and prosper plan. Leather stands alone.

It is vital that tanners stop the waste. If hides continue to be dumped because the routes to the tannery are uneconomic, ways must be found to change this before it is too late and alternate options become dominant at the abattoir.

We must own the hides and skins

Hides and skins are the primary raw material of our industry and tanners must be in charge of them. To get them all into leather, new levels of innovation and new ways of thinking about leather are needed. Is it enough to be a traditional leather maker? What is the role of craft, of non-woven knowledge and collagen expertise?

I look back on my long career in leather with disappointment as I see little of the progress needed to renew our thinking, indeed the reverse. Leather making seems trapped by ingrained habits and fear when it comes to new things, and the ideas being promulgated are based on 20^th century “efficiency” rather than the historical “art of leathermaking”.

Yes, we have had outstanding new machinery and some clever chemicals but why did the change to chromium from vegetable tanning involve creating “side leather”? Whose clever idea was that? Who asked for it? Who did it benefit? Answers on a postcard please.

The concept that a regular fully usable piece of leather can be made out of a side that includes a bit of the butt, the belly, the shoulder and the neck creates a technological nightmare. Heavy, costly trimming becomes a factor. To get to a more level product, tanners became product engineers, thus making leather more of a commodity. A side needed more pigment, more correcting, more printing to become level. With the grain removed or hidden, the fundamental aesthetics are gone; there is no chance of creating a patina. The craft of the leather industry is lost to engineering when it needs to be both. In such circumstances only the very premium hides, plus the calf and veal stay true to the leather we talk about.

Ponder this as you walk the corridors in Milan next week. What should a tanner in 2025 who wants to survive and prosper be like?

Michael Redwood

Leather chemist, writer, and advisor on responsible leather manufacturing and material strategy. This article was originally written for ILM.