Squarebird Development

We catch up with Liam Maher, Global Creative Director at ECCO and Stefano Pillepich, Head of ECCO Leather Goods to hear about the unique qualities, cultural and human values of leather and how they are both passionate about the sustainability of leather at ECCO.

Where do I start!? What constitutes my own feelings about “great design” and to a great degree this is also true within my role at Ecco, I look for three elements. I look to embody and harmonize aspects of:

1. Where do I come from?
2. Where do I belong?
3. Where do I hope to go?

Given that I see design this way, the idea of memory is obviously central to achieving this blend within product. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that out of all the materials used in fashion and footwear (wovens, knits, felts in cottons, silks, velvets, canvases, twills, damasks, brocades, nylons, rayons, ramies, viscoses, bio-fibres, etc) l

“Leather is the material with by far the greatest potential to capture memory. When both designers and consumers who are passionate about leather talk about this, you’ll often here them describe leather as a living material. Leather captures, complements, and remembers shape”

Like a living thing, it also changes over time. In fact,  the way it changes has a humanistic quality – it becomes more supple, softer and more mellow… kind of like a person. Folks will even describe their relationship with a leather product –  whether it’s shoes, bags or garments – as if it were a friendship.

Not only this, but unlike any other material, leather has the potential to take infinite forms, infinite hand-feels, infinite colors and infinite finishes. You need a visionary tannery packed with experienced and passionate leather makers like the ones we’re lucky enough to work with at ECCO Leather.

“What other material can reproduce the look and touch of a flower petal in one instance and the strength and robustness of a biker-jacket in another”?

Here again it’s a material which can simultaneously encompass and balance elements of where I come from, where I belong and where I hope to go. Our past, present, and future.

It’s fascinating to me that leather isn’t commonly regarded as an inherently sustainable material. The alchemy of tanning leather is essentially an ancient act of upcycling.

Clearly there are cultural, political and lifestyle values connected to meat consumption and populations quite rightly have different opinions on the subject. That’s great. It’s also great that those feelings and values are ever evolving. That is absolutely as it should be. But looked at through a realistic lens of where we are as a society today, the state of meat consumption remains at a level that ensures the processing of its primary byproduct into a valuable resource like leather remains a huge opportunity.

Maybe there’s something about the words that would need to be used to tell the story… -words like “meat” and “skin” and “animal”, that make this story hard to tell if we believe consumers don’t want to hear these words. But that doesn’t change the fact that leather is sustainable as well as being substantial and reliable at scale in the here-and-now.

Since there is no one as chronically dissatisfied as an inspired tanner or leather maker, the future will always be bright. If you take ECCO Leather as an example, the tannery’s chronic dissatisfaction has led to asking over and over again “how can it be more sustainable?”. This drive has led to milestone innovations like DriTanTM and the many others currently in the ECCO Leather development pipeline. Yes. The future is bright.

I often say that leather is the ultimate upcycled material, since a caveman found a hide in a ditch and realized it wasn’t decaying. It is amazing to see the evolution of leather throughout the millennia, not only when it comes to its end-use, but also how its performance and, from a creative perspective, aesthetics have evolved.

Leather is warm to the touch, a natural insulator and water resistant and even a fire retardant: amazing characteristic when it comes to a natural material. Leather is exceptionally versatile when it comes to look, touch and feel: from traditional looks like pebble (“discovered” in the 18th century) to transparent leather (vellum, from ancient Egypt), from leathers fused to other materials to more traditional vacchetta.

Leather can be made in different substance, weight, smooth or rough, dull or shiny, it can be embossed, printed on, dyed in unlimited colors; in ECCO Leather we like to say that making leather is like cooking: with the same ingredients, so many distinctive dishes can be created; and this is also true to leather. It is an upcycled blank-canvas material with almost unlimited possibility that is only limited by lack of creativity or too much traditionalism.

Right now, I’m filming more episodes of The Repair Shop. It’s lovely. It’s my foundation work and to be part of the show is incredibly humbling and good fun. It enhances everything I believe in. I’m also on a book tour as I’ve had my first biography published this year.
The book is mostly based in America – about living a wild life but with the foundation of what I do as a craftsperson – which kept me grounded and safe!

What’s inspiring me? Everything! I have a break from filming in October and I have so many projects planned from designing and making coats and luggage, re-creating lots of the patterns in the case makers workbooks that I’ve collected – using all recycled materials. Also I’m designing some new saddles and going to America!

I was always also re-making things. It became really natural to me. In the 70s when I was at college, I bought everything secondhand. Much of my wardrobe today is an array of colour and beautiful fabrics – all pre-reloved pieces. I have the same passion for saddle repair.

When I was working as a saddler, I would always modify saddles to accommodate customer needs. Rather than just saying, go and buy a new one!

One of my planned projects is to start secondhand saddle sales. Making sure every saddle has a full MOT and ready for re-sale.

Here in the UK, most people will do their training through the Society of Saddle Makers and their recognised schools. If you’re fortunate enough to get an apprenticeship – which I was – you do a combined apprenticeship with college work. I completed 2 years at Cordwainers College where I studied footwear, leather goods and saddlery. I then did my formal apprenticeship with Ken and other Masters too.

In my day it was 7 years of apprenticeship and then you enter a ‘Journeyman’ phase where you develop your skills. Although this process has been shortened today, it’s a fine balance of having a good foundation of training then spending the rest of your working life honing your skills.

I have never been motivated by money. It’s been 50 years of always wanting to do this work! It’s all I have ever wanted to do.

When I receive a commission for a saddle design. I love the process. It’s like creating a piece of art. I make the patterns and I can select my hides. I begin mapping out the leather. Where each piece will go – including the hardest wearing pieces – where the leather will receive the most stress. You cut your patterns in accordance with where each leather piece is needed best. We are very lucky in this country to have really well produced hides. English leather is definitely the best in Europe.

Each saddle feels like a piece of me. I have a ‘buy back scheme’ and through a registration process, I know where all my saddles are!

Creating something bespoke – it takes time. I want the saddles to last at least 100 years. So each saddle takes about 65 hours with fittings in between. But I also offer an after sales service because the relationship with horse and rider is on-going. It’s about the horse and rider combination. Getting the saddle right through understanding unique biomechanics.

In my heart of hearts, I really do feel we are on the crest of valuing and appreciating well produced leather coming back into its own. We have an amazing group of people, foundations and societies working together to ensure leather is the highest quality with best practice in play including compassionate cattle rearing.

High quality leather should be costed accordingly and for me, we should appreciate good quality leather because it can last for hundreds of years.

It’s a good question and one I’ve been trying to figure out! What I would say is that many people and women in particular are concerned about the impact of taking a career break. Before I started The Cambridge Satchel Company, I was home being a full time mum because I’m not brilliant at multi-tasking – I like to focus on one thing at a time!

I was fortunate enough to be able to take that break and be with my children, Emily and Max when they were very little. I was at home for 8 years! But because I like to be busy I was volunteering everywhere. I was the village busybody! Although I was involved in a lot of things, I was on a career break which for me was no bad thing. People can get concerned that if they take a break it might not look good on their CV. Before the pandemic a break was perhaps seen as a red flag but now there’s more appreciation for the value of space and flexibility.

When I founded Cambridge Satchel, I was ready. I was able to focus and make a good job of starting it. I did that CEO role for 14 years – right up until the end of last year. But at the end, I needed time to decompress. It’s hard to just stop thinking. I couldn’t just jump from one intense role to another one. This has been a time to improve my health. I’m in a good healthy state and its given me a chance to do those things that I’ve always wanted to get around to.

Entrepreneurs come in all sizes with different motivations. Mine was clear and straightforward. I wanted to send my children to a great school. For a variety of reasons, the state school option was no longer working for my children so I decided to send them to a private school in Cambridge. When I found out how expensive they were though – I was flabbergasted! I was a stay at home mum and we had never budgeted for private school. I set myself this goal of generating enough money to raise the school fees within 10 weeks. I started with £600 and the idea of starting something that would pay the school fees. According to Google this counts as a Moonshot! I developed an Excel spreadsheet with 10 ideas and what startup money I would need and whether it was sustainable and what would happen if I died of a heart attack during the process! It seemed like the most logical way of doing these things. The idea of supplying satchels was there.

I was very fortunate that when I started in 2007 – social media wasn’t as established, nowhere near as commercialised. No one wins a race looking over their shoulder, so don’t be put off by what’s going on around you. Imposter Syndrome is such a negative force.

Also don’t ask for too many opinions – these can just put you off doing anything. Advice can be discouraging and often not objective. Research to help overcome a challenge but avoid using this as a means of procrastination.

Think about ‘what’s the worst that can happen?’ You often realise that by doing this exercise – the outcome is not that bad Another piece of advice I have is that when you are very close to realising a positive result, don’t give up. Try again another way. Another small push along that route will often get you there.

I was asked by the then Prime Minister, David Cameron to conduct a review of Self Employment in the UK. Unsurprisingly I found that one of the biggest issues faced by the self employed is a sense of loneliness and isolation. So I looked at libraries. Places that are comfortable to work from with a sense of community.The Business and IP centres within libraries are wonderful, objective and accessible. So my advice is to encourage those starting out in business to see if their local library has a Business and IP Centre, most of the main ones do.

Julie Dean is a supporter of our online exhibition It’s A Long Story. It’s A Long Story is designed to take visitors on a rich and inspiring digital journey celebrating the long lasting, circular, repairable, upcycling and recycling qualities that leather can offer.

In spring 2017, Kadri Vunder Fontana, a chemist and experienced business woman, and Conny Thiel-Egenter, a biologist and passionate hunter, founded Cervo Volante with the aim of producing something valuable from hunting waste and processing the leather into fine products.

Leather is a natural material and in using the hides and skins that are the by-product of the food industry, leather makes its contribution to a circular society every single day, but once a year we come together to celebrate its benefits as a material, the people that make it and the innovation and expertise that continue to push it forward.

There are many complicated messages about how to live more sustainably, but leather is NOT complicated. Simply put, without it, around 10 million tonnes would go to landfill. In a world where we are trying to do more with less, keep waste to a minimum, and where we have the expertise and the technology to turn this by-product into a versatile, long-lasting material we have a responsibility to do just that.

It’s important to remember that alternatives to leather are, the main synthetic and fossil-fuel based. Even those that sound natural or as though they come from plants often need combining with PU for strength and stability. Check out our fact sheet on labelling to learn more. 

The first step to make in reducing impact for all of us as individuals, is to buy fewer things that last a long time. Choosing leather items from footwear to furniture, bags to apparel, means investing items that will last, wear beautifully and can be repaired through their lifetime.

That’s why in 2023 World Leather Day celebrates the long lasting* beauty of leather and its place in a circular economy.

*The FILK independent study showed that leather compared to many of its alternatives gave the balance of comfort and wear – check out the full report here: Benchmark Study on Leather Alternatives Published

Modern leather making is clean and highly regulated. Want to know what to look for in terms of certification of the leather you buy? Independent bodies such as Leather Working Group, (LWG) Institute of Quality Certification for the Leather Sector, (I.C.E.C. Italy) Brazilian Leather Certification of Sustainability (C.S.C.B. Brazil) Leather Standard by Oeko-Tex and the Sustainable Leather Foundation (S.L.F.) audit tanneries in terms of best practice. Look out for their symbols and learn more here – Certification.

If you’d like to help celebrate World Leather Day 2024, please register here.