October 22, 2025

Rethinking the value of leather

One of the most important markets for leather is luxury. Leather dominates some major luxury areas such as bags and footwear but seeps into almost all other categories as a major or minor but essential component as with furniture, luxury vehicles, yachts and even watch straps. In luxury experiences, leather is often used in furniture and interior design in the top hotels and forms of travel.

Leather is very demanding of grades and quality consistency but when relationships are built, they are long lasting and offer predictability and security for tanneries. For most of the past 40 years, the luxury sector, along with automobiles, has been a highlight for leather offering growth, decent margins and a lot of innovative flair. Luxury has played an outsized and organisationally significant role in how the leather industry is shaped, perceived and valued.

For the past decade, the trajectory of luxury has been relentlessly upwards, and an industry once built on scarcity and exclusivity seemed untouched by increasing accessibility and cheaper price ranges supported by heavy branding. During the Pandemic, most luxury groups still managed to balance the turbulence in the main markets of the U.S., China, Japan and Europe with great success to maintain the momentum.

Brand overproduction

This has inevitably created a level of overproduction by luxury brands that contradicts exclusivity. Traditional consumers and younger generations are asking if there is real value behind the price, especially after recent huge increases. Is it time for the leather industry to recognise that the future must reject the marketing inflation of luxury into “accessible luxury,” “masstige,” or endless seasonal novelties? Some of these sectors may continue, and still hold a certain value, but they should not pretend to be luxury when based only on a logo and a price boosted by hefty marketing costs.

That is why the last 24 months has seen this growth stall. The steep price rises have impacted even the richest buyers while the poorer ones have stepped away altogether.

Tanners want consumers to think about more than price

Some of the thinking in Mark Carney’s book Value(s): Building a Better World for All (2021) would have helped luxury brands get a hold of their problems much earlier. Now that they seem to be getting there, they are closer to higher level leather industry thoughts, which wants brands and consumers to think beyond price as the sole measure of value.

Carney explains how consumers confuse value with market price. Consumer purchasing has moved away from the classic, considered approach, so now impulse and emotional purchasing dominates. Products are often bought by consumers only “because of what they think it says about them”. This way increasingly value has become equated with price.

Such price/value confusion can erode trust and damage the less tangible areas such as the environment which have no financial value to be priced into the system. We have no way to value the Amazon Biome, but hour by hour the value of the business Amazon is published.

Hopefully, we are now seeing the return journey for luxury to an industry once dominated by the artisan. Once again defined as rarity (but not contrived rarity), durability and its meaning in use, as well as craftsmanship. Such luxury has its origin in antiquity and was most often associated with leather goods since leather was both ubiquitous and essential. The core concept behind luxury as explained by Aristotle was what was used over and above what is needed for a good life and only if linked to virtuosity.

Leather in luxury became prominent in Europe after the Islamic years in Andalusia where historic and global skills were brought together. It is no accident that so many leather types and terms are named after the city of Cordoba in Spain. For the rest of Europe, the Renaissance really began the luxury business and all manner of fine products made of leather became major categories. Beautiful leather goods from books to gloves became major gifts demanded by Royals and members of the Court.

As the 19th and 20th centuries advanced luxury became increasingly linked to status, elite consumption and exclusivity became defined by elevated prices.

Bring craft and cultural heritage back to the fore

A quarter into the fast evolving 21st century, if the original, more virtuous aspect of luxury is really returning, it is long overdue in a world characterised by waste, excess and levels of greed which all disregard for the foundations of our society – both human and environmental. For leather going into luxury priorities must bring craft and cultural heritage back to the fore, including the importance of place related to raw materials and the location of the artisans. Many French and Italian tanners already live in this space – they must not deviate,

Responsible material use was always vital but now it must reiterate the values of durability and repairability. And when we talk about making leather responsibly, this must be elevated to proper ethical and environmental stewardship. The concept of efficiency as defined over the last five decades must be replaced by a sense of fundamental purpose. Deskilling, cutting corners, evading tax and other tricks for profit alone is no longer in the deal. Adam Smith’s moral capitalism approach encourages tanneries to redefine productivity not by turnover but by lifecycle performance and regenerative sourcing.

A well-made leather bag or pair of shoes, crafted to last decades, repairable, traceable to responsibly sourced hides, and expressive of cultural skill, meets this definition of luxury.

By comparison, a mass-produced “luxury” branded bag designed for seasonal turnover and emotional status signalling does not. In areas where leather is used to create mass-produced “luxury” leather goods, we usually find them overproduced, ephemeral, reliant not on quality but branding and often environmentally damaging. These products will be priced only for margin, not value. Leather becomes a mere commodity. Given that at full capacity, using 100% of all raw material, tanneries can make no more than 25 billion square feet, leather cannot afford to be wasted to these devious sectors.

Instead, leather should help rebuild the “value for money” products that consumers once trusted and saved for. Such products and brands held an important place in the market. They were well made, with good materials and a reputation for lasting. They were not cheap but paid back in wear per use; they never pretended to be “luxury”. They made up an even larger category than luxury, but still at a manageable price.

Luxury is a great market for some tanners, but all others should remind themselves it is time to properly define value for money as so much more than price alone.

Michael Redwood

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