December 18, 2024

Numbers count in the tannery

It is a boring adage that if you cannot measure something you cannot manage it, but mostly it is true. Hand staining vegetable tanned leather is one of very few tannery jobs that does not now involve numerical control. Otherwise, it is always about having accurate data. When all is well, measures are rigorously adhered to and required adjustments are carefully recorded.

Tannery controls are constantly improving, aided by sensible use of digital tools but working on the business picture has been getting more complex. We see this regularly with national economic data where it is often missing, deliberately or accidentally confusing or wrong. In the UK, economists have been told that it will take years to correct major errors in employment data and GDP figures are constantly requiring revision.

In the leather industry, the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) gave up its excellent compendium of world hide, skin and leather production data a decade ago. There was a time when this could be combined with national statistics presented annually by country at the annual International Council of Tanners meeting to give a solid feel for how your nation sat within the world of leather.

When applied to detailed tannery data, along with industry data and reports from sales staff and agents, it was possible to build quite a clear picture of the workings of the leather industry and where your own business fitted in. And trends could be identified and with intelligence future scenarios planned for.

Today, reasonable data still comes from China, India and Brazil with less complete information from the U.S. and the EU. The rest of the world is very patchy. Overall, the units of measure vary as raw and part processed material regularly gets muddled or double counted as it traverses the world. Splits are a nightmare and export data is often in currency rather than volume.

On the consumption side, World Footwear’s annual footwear industry publication, which is published in Portugal by APICCAPS, has been a big help, but other end uses tend to be best estimates or extrapolations. Every nation seems to have a different opinion of the size of the world trade in leather and the implications of their share.

Lessons from Charles Booth

There is perhaps a message here from the founder of the Booth Group, Charles Booth. For those who do not know, he was born in Liverpool, England, in 1840 and established the Booth Group as a skin and leather trading business between England and the U.S. in 1862. He bought into a tannery in Gloversville, upstate New York, to support a clever technician who had been robbed by his commercial partner. It became a hotbed for innovation, including leading the conversations and industry partnership for Schultz to develop his two famous chrome tanning partners. Booths made big profits from two leather for light weight footwear, first from a Gambier/Al mix and then when it was ready from chrome tanned kidskins.

But, as a forward-looking industrialist who encouraged new ideas, he liked to control his business through detailed numbers. While the trading and tanning business expanded in volumes and geography, he added a small shipping line working with Brazil.

Booth had always been engaged with community matters so, when an 1883 report suggested that 25% of London’s society lived in extreme poverty, he was shocked and decided to prove it was overstated. He personally paid for offices and a sizeable staff and led them in a street-by-street survey. He often stayed overnight in people’s homes so he could better comprehend their position.

Generally, he spent three months of each year in the U.S. looking after the tannery and trading matters and a day a week in England monitoring the business. Otherwise, he was mostly able to progress his project.

He was dissatisfied with the contemporary statistical work on social data and his carefully studied methods were pioneering. He produced and published nine volumes of Life and Labour of the People of London between 1892 and 1897 and further works until 1903, by which time there were 17 volumes. As part of the project, he produced detailed maps that coloured residential streets according to the wealth of their inhabitants.

The importance of Booth’s work in social statistics was recognised by the Royal Statistical Society where he was elected President between 1892-94 and awarded its Gold Medal. This recognised that he had devised, organised and funded the most comprehensive and scientific social survey of London life ever carried out.

To his surprise, he discovered that poverty ran not at 25% but even higher at 30%. He dispelled arguments that tried to create classes of “deserving” and “undeserving” poor. He fought for the introduction of universal Old Age Pensions (which eventually began in 1908 in the UK) and free school meals. His maps are still used today, and some argue that the social reforms he battled for were ultimately the foundational thinking behind Britain’s Welfare State.

Sadly, he tends not to be remembered as a tanner. While enjoying his wealth, working “in a trade” like making leather was seen as rather too lowly by his wife and some of his London society friends. So, they tended to call him a shipowner or man of commerce. But it is quite clear that it was leather that provided what would be worth many millions of dollars today to pay for this work.

Charles Booth was willing to fight for good data and he demonstrated how it can provide the lever to change the world. Perhaps, as we come close to 2025, a useful New Year’s wish would be for better statistics.

Michael Redwood

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