We recently published our 5th Annual Report and as ever, we want to share our huge thanks to all our members!
Member support enables us to continue to deliver valuable work in the promotion of the positive benefits of leather.
By way of top highlights – here’s the summary!
- Our Impact Team is undertaking great work in the LifeCycle Assessment Study, ensuring data about the impact of leather is easier to understand – and find!
- We continue to champion education from our #Leather Truthfully campaign to our Modern Leather Making Guide.
- We’re now ranking as a leading authority to answer questions about leather thanks to our social media team and Google!
The Report reflects on some of our key achievements in 2023:
- A focused attention on digital marketing (SEO) and paid search means Leather Naturally is recognised by Google as an authoritative source to answer questions about leather. Additionally we know that 90% of the visitors to our website that click on a paid search link remain on the website for long enough to engage with the content – meaning that they are finding the information they came for!
- It’s A Long Story was an evolution of our 2022 education and enlightenment campaign – #Leather Truthfully. This campaign drove engagement with journalists by establishing Leather Naturally as a resource for fast facts about leather.
In 2023 we built on that progress. ‘It’s A Long Story’ was the world’s first digital exhibition that chimed with consumer narratives around slowing down consumption and focusing on leather longevity, repair and reuse. The exhibition positioned leather as the material of choice for a society that wants to do more with less, with features on repair, iconic leather products and an exclusive podcast with BBC presenter Suzie Fletcher. The exhibition, (at a time that Apple was abandoning leather) prompted Fashion Network to announce “The headline news might be all about leather alternatives but the leather sector is fighting back to prove its sustainability credentials’
- Audience engagement was a key theme through 2023, as Leather Naturally followed up World Leather Day with its ‘Get the Facts’ icon and an exclusive member dashboard aimed at making it easy to share information and promote leather.
- Our newly formed Impact Team started its work to further an understanding of how leather can be part of the solution for a circular economy, through data as part of Life Cycle Assessments and the wider context of regenerative agriculture. •
- The Modern Leather Making Guide continues to set the standard for easy-to-understand education around leather making. Now downloaded thousands of times, members are encouraged to share this resource with brands and retailers looking for accessible training tools for their teams.
- Adding value for our members and enabling our actions as a collective voice was the force behind the creation of our new member dashboard. Exclusive to Leather Naturally members, the dashboard has social media downloads, content ideas, presentations and more. Designed to be used as they are, or to provide inspiration and messaging ideas for your own promotions, the intention is the same, to empower the industry-wide engagement that will increase knowledge of the benefits of leather and its relevance as a modern material.
Looking ahead, Leather Naturally has been working with SPIN 360 on a Life Cycle Assessment Study designed to create a new benchmark for leather. During the completion of the work in 2023 a decision was taken to submit collectively with Leather Working Group, its LCA in order to strengthen the data as part of a submission to Worldly, (HIGG) with the intention of establishing a more up to date benchmark for leather. That work is ongoing and expected to be delivered Q3 2024.
Part of the remit of the newly formed Impact Team is to take some of the more complex topics around leather, and make them easier to understand. In 2023 it worked on Regenerative Agriculture, a subject that is gaining attention, especially in conjunction with its connection to leather. The resulting paper, which can be found here, explains it in simple terms and was one of our most widely read social links. In 2024 and to complement its key project, the team will deconstruct LCAs, creating brand toolkit explaining how they should be interpreted and used.
And hot off the press – we are delighted to share the best ever engagement results for our World Leather Day campaign 2024. We built momentum through the month of April with social media posts, videos, blogs, interviews and animated content that helped educate and inspire our community and consumers around our 3 core themes: Repair, Reuse and Repurpose.
We received 729 reactions, 900% increase in comments for April and received an average of 150 engagements on Linkedin and nearly 300 Instagram responses on World Leather Day! Thank you to everyone who downloaded our social media assets and helped share and reshare this momentous campaign.