Dr Mike Redwood
Retail is being transformed, offices are evolving, cities are getting younger, people have started saving more and governments have started to persuade them to spend again. In many such ways we are manoeuvring our way towards a new normal – if there ever was any such thing as normal anyway.
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Picture: The Climate Reality Project
Despite what are arguably more pressing problems that the world is facing right now due to the ongoing Covid-19 crisis, the attacks on leather and the wider industry are not letting up, with certain lobby and interest groups continuing their slander of our sector, processes and products.
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Dr Mike Redwood
In the last decade, companies have slowly come to realise that a communications strategy does not work if it does not include a significant weighting towards social media. They have also very reluctantly accepted that it is not free, but that to make serious inroads money needs to be spent, and if an agency is being used to do it, a lot of training is required before they can reply meaningfully and promptly to enquiries.
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Dr Mike Redwood
A few weeks ago I was intrigued to see an unexpected response to an item I wrote here from Gustavo Gonzalez-Quijano, the longstanding Secretary-General of Cotance.
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Dr Mike Redwood
The Covid-19 era is leaving retail exposed. It is clear that consumers still want to visit physical stores, but the role stores play in the cycle of purchasing has been changing for some time. Now what we call the ‘High Street’ has been transformed by the three months of closure, consumer confinement and fear.
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Dr Mike Redwood
I had a dream; a dream that Clarks had announced the creation of 1000 jobs as they fought back against the ravages being done to the global economy and society by this wicked pandemic.
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Dr Mike Redwood
The Italian Leather federation (UNIC) announced late last week that after a long battle, it had been successful in persuading the Italian Government to adopt a legal definition for leather that will stop the term “leather” being used for anything not of animal origin.
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Picture: Jez Timms
What has happened to the meat industry? Is it so confident that the developing world will continue to turn to meat as the middle classes grow that it does not care about its image or reputation? Is it wise to brush off challenges related to climate change, land use, deforestation, animal welfare and dietary health as impertinent irrelevances which will never stop this steadily progressing juggernaut of an industry from carrying on as normal?
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Picture: Campaign Creators
There has been a lot of talk lately about the role of the ‘influencer’ and how ‘influencer marketing’ is going to change, become obsolete even, as consumers’ priorities are shifting in the wake of the pandemic and they are seeking more authentic, ‘real’ role models and more relatable aspirations.
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The relation the leather industry has with the consumer has become far more complex in recent times. That complexity has come from the power of brands and the tools they use to communicate with consumers to make the consumer not bother to understand the material but acknowledge only the logo.
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Dr Mike Redwood
If there is one thing that unites tanners in every part of the world, it is an emotional delight in making leather, in being part of the leather industry. The joy of tanning is to handle the leather, to smell the leather and to see its beauty appear as it is transformed from caterpillar to butterfly through the processing.
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Dr Mike Redwood
The exceptional, and controversial, use of an Executive Order to reopen meatpackers in the US that had been shut because of outbreaks of Coronavirus brings with it a requirement for us all to understand more about the resilience and integrity of our supply chain.
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Dr Mike Redwood
This is the moment when companies really discover whether they have true marketers or only communications staff in their team, as now it is the fundamental tools of marketing that are needed.
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Dr Mike Redwood
As we look out, there is a growing determination to get the world back to work in order to minimise the already huge social, economic and psychological damage being done. The decisions do not appear to be only based on saving lives, as other factors such as the economy, winning elections and taking tighter political control are being assessed by our world leaders.
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Dr Mike Redwood
We need to be careful about the balance of our antagonism to the marketing of competitive materials.
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Picture: Deichmann
The coronavirus pandemic has hit businesses of all sizes and guises hard, all around the world. But it seems not everyone is responding to the crisis in the same way, with some conducting themselves more ethically than others.
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Dr Mike Redwood
If you agree that 85% of jobs that we will be doing in 2030 have not been invented yet, education and in-work training is going to have to change. We have lost huge numbers of occupations over the last few decades, and in many areas the jobs lost from the west, that are often the subject of complaint or nostalgia, have already changed so much, they will never come back.
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Credit: Luke Insoll
In one of his ILM blogs posted on this website in January 2019, Mike Redwood referred to an interesting comment posed at a Leather Naturally panel meeting during the Portland Materials Show which took pace in the Autumn of 2018. John Graebin, Director of Materials for Deckers Outdoor Corp, asked the audience to consider how leather would be viewed if it was discovered today for the first time. A renewable, sustainable, durable, versatile yet beautiful material; in fact, the very best example of what a modern material in its class should be.
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Dr Mike Redwood
Over the last few decades, the leather industry has become caught up and dragged along in the world of modern retail and fast fashion. We have steadily suffered from it as prices have been dragged down to meet supposed consumer expectations. Even the so-called luxury sector has pushed hard for share of retail with glitzy marketing and stores in every major airport and city on the globe and has kept margins very tight, with most of the tanners used in supply.
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Dr Mike Redwood
As the world is impacted by a virus whose origins and spread has been a consequence of globalisation, it is individual countries which have been acting to date, and responding one by one to the situation it finds itself in. While the factories of much of China return to work and the shops there reopen, Europe and the USA are shutting both as I write.
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Credit: Philipp Lublasser
As the world is battling a pandemic of unparalleled scale, global leaders are increasingly resorting to wartime analogies to describe the current situation. We are indeed at war. And the fact that the enemy is an invisible virus, makes it all the more difficult and harder to “fight”, to stay within the terminology.
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Dr Mike Redwood
The islands in the South Atlantic were remote and hard to reach. Our three weeks walking and watching wildlife there had been deliberately chosen a year ago; a place where we would be free of everyday news and the unrelenting pressures of the internet. The global state of affairs before and after our trip could hardly have been more stark in contrast.
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Picture: Burberry
When Marco Gobetti, CEO of British luxury brand Burberry, announced his turnaround strategy for the ailing fashion house around two and a half years ago, he put expansion into leather goods and handbags - an area where the brand has struggled to compete - at the top of his agenda.
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Dr Mike Redwood
I have just ended a rather tough week. For four days I was away studying plastics, and then I went to see the recently released film Dark Waters.
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Dr Mike Redwood
One of the most curious aspects of the last decade has been the absence of the leather industry from social media, while most of our customers in key areas like sports, automotive and luxury have become global leaders in using it to advantage.
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Dr Mike Redwood
A little over two years ago at the International Marine Protected Areas Congress (IMPAC4) in Chile, one of the most influential attendees was quoted saying “in the space of a single generation, human activity has severely damaged the ocean by catching fish faster than they can reproduce while also destroying their nurseries.”
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Dr Mike Redwood
It is barely daylight as I write this, not yet 6am. It is Sunday and this is the Southern Hemisphere. Our position is about 53 degrees South and only 1,200 km from the Antarctic Peninsula across what is called Drake Passage. It has felt like a wild night as the wind has howled around our primitive accommodation in an old container – adapted into what was once commonly called a Portacabin.
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Isabella Griffiths
By the time you are reading this, Veganuary 2020, the campaign to encourage consumers to switch to a plant-based diet during the month of January, will have almost come to an end, and if the media hype is to be believed, with a record uptake (around 350,000 people are said to have signed up to the initiative in the UK at the start of January). We will have to wait for the final stats to get a clearer picture of the ultimate response, not just in the UK, but globally, as the official campaign was also launched in Germany, the U.S. and Chile for the first time.
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Dr Mike Redwood
Eighteen months ago, we were having dinner with Bob Higham and his wife Diana in their house in Berwick, on the border of Scotland and England. Recently having entered his eighties, he was still actively interested in the leather industry, and busy continuing to plan more cross-country walks to support charities such as the Nepal Leprosy Trust, where he had been a Trustee in the 80s and 90s, and the Berwickshire Christian Youth Trust.
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Dr Mike Redwood
If ever there was a time to find ways to do things differently, and remotely, now is that time.
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Dr Mike Redwood
1. Make it properly and don’t cut corners with cheap chemicals and badly maintained machinery. Hides and skins may be renewable - up to a point - but they are a costly, valuable resource.
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Picture credit: Toimetaja Tolkeburoo
In the same week that Autocar published an article propagating the rise of vegan leathers in the car industry, attentions turned to the sporting world, too, with fellow British newspaper The Telegraph publishing a piece titled “If sport is really going vegan, is it time to get rid of leather cricket balls?”
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Dr Mike Redwood
Are we a lazy industry? I sometimes wonder. Twice in the last two weeks I have been asked about comparative test data to compare leather with synthetics, and as far as I know, as an industry we have no peer reviewed papers which we can use as an industry to fight our case.
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Dr Mike Redwood
When thinking about raw material these days, we tend to focus on two issues – animal welfare and traceability. These have arisen to create auditable routes which fit into a “tick-box” approach and certainly have their relevance.
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Dr Mike Redwood
We are now entering the third decade of the new millennium and are in sight of that far-off year of 2050. Only three decades to go. A look back at the last three decades of the leather industry is not reassuring.
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Could 2020 be a better year for the leather industry?
To say 2019 has been a difficult year for the leather sector is nothing short of an understatement. The industry has been under attack from all fronts and there have been some casualties along the way. Writes ILM Editor, Isabella Griffiths.
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Dr Mike Redwood
I was impressed by the positioning of the Dacia Logan when it first launched in 2004 and enjoyed the fact that in a marketing class of 200 students at the University of Bath, for many years the students had no idea what a Dacia Logan actually was. Meanwhile, it was proving itself spectacularly successful and a perfect example of a product designed to meet a well defined consumer demand.
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Dr Mike Redwood
China has just instructed all its government organisations not only to buy Chinese software and computers, but to remove foreign ones. It is one of the clearest signs yet that the tariff battles initiated by the U.S. are set to leave a legacy long after any change in administrations in both or either countries.
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Dr Mike Redwood
The move by Heller Leather to link with Bolt Threads, the owner of MYLO, will come as a shock to many passionate tanners who hate the marketing approach of the new materials being presented as replacements for leather.
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Picture: Leit & Held
I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Nina Conrad, the Head of Supply Chain Management at Leit & Held, a young German leather goods label founded by a trio of women with an interdisciplinary background in design, interior architecture and sustainability.
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Dr Mike Redwood
The best things in life are free, so we are told; although it is hard to imagine how this applies to the leather industry. For me, it took the unexpected serendipity of a trip to Ethiopia, for it was there I was able to spend an hour with Ivan Král who runs the leather side of UNIDO from his office high in the UNIDO building in Vienna.
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Dr Mike Redwood
It is easy to complain about the film Erin Brockovich creating the public sentiment against chromium, and to be angry with PETA and other vegan and animal rights groups for their propaganda against anything to do with animals. The FAO were clearly to blame for a gross error in releasing the 2006 report Livestock’s Long Shadow and providing supposedly authoritative data to be used against animal products.
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Dr Mike Redwood
Alexander Hamilton, the Secretary of the U.S. Treasury, produced his Report To Congress On The Subject Of Manufactures in 1791. A lot of politics was involved, and he ended his life being fatally injured duelling with swords. Many of his views fit (or are made to fit) with the recent more isolationist thinking that has stalled what appeared to be relentless progress towards globalisation and western style democracy.
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Picture: EcoDomo
For a while now fashion retailers such as Marks & Spencer in the UK, Swedish fashion giant H&M, Spanish headquartered chain Zara or U.S. brands such as North Face or Eileen Fisher, to name just a few, have been offering take-back programmes of used clothing.
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Dr Mike Redwood
Increasingly, brands have started to accept and even work with the second-hand market. The jump from loud consumer complaints about Burberry burning old stock to offering some of those who sell second-hand items via their US partner The RealReal and a personal shopping session and tea is indicative of a big change of heart.
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Dr Mike Redwood
It is worth having a brief look at Bangladesh. With over ten years of steadily rising costs in China and now a trade war ongoing between China and the U.S., Bangladesh should be reaping the benefit with a world leading leather industry.
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Dr Mike Redwood
Not many from the leather industry attended the first edition of the Sustainable Fashion Conference on March 14, 2019 during the APLF Show in Hong Kong. It was held upstairs, in the expansive area to which the whole show will move next year, allowing everyone more space to move about in.
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Credit: Artificial Photography
Before I joined ILM earlier this year, I spent 13 years as Editor of a leading b2b magazine for the fashion retail industry in the UK, arguably one of the most prestigious apparel markets and most dynamic retail sectors in the world.
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Dr Mike Redwood
Leather making is difficult. What we are doing is “conditioning” a natural material to stabilise the structure against bacteria and adjust it to perfectly serve its required end use.
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Dr Mike Redwood
There is no doubt that a new impetus has been needed in the leather industry that must be built around the two fundamentals of marketing and innovation. What is more, neither can be quiet, incremental and merely involve more of the same as in the past.
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