How a Woodworking Convention in Philadelphia Completely Changed Our Leather Company

“You realize this is a wood-show, don’t you?” That was what the man said to me as I setup at my DCT Leathers booth at a woodworking convention near Philadelphia, PA, circa 1998. The man gestured across the trade-show floor from where he’d come: a slick, pitch-perfect booth that showcased his company’s top-of-the-line woodworking machinery and the like.

I shrugged and said something like, “Well, I guess I thought this might be good way to reach out to the furniture industry.”

“Reach out to the furniture industry?”

“Yeah, I guess I figure woodworkers and furniture makers need leather to help make some of their furniture. That’s why I’m here.”

The man shrugged at my own shrug, smiled, and nodded good-bye, with a look on his face that said something along the lines of, “Yeah. Good luck buddy.” For all I knew he was right: out of a jam-packed woodworking convention center, mine was the only booth that had anything to do with leather. I stood stiffly behind my table, wondering if I’d made the right choice to make the trip here from Toronto.

The next day visitors were crowding around my booth, taking a look at the leather cowhides I offered. Some were antique restorers who needed customized leather to help refurbish a certain piece of furniture. Others were furniture manufacturers looking for new suppliers ; they wanted to see whether I could supply their leather needs in bulk. Others were just curious as to what I was doing at a woodworking show. At any rate, my booth got pretty crowded. At one point I glanced across the showcase floor to where the smirking woodworking salesman had come from: he just stood there along with his fellow salesmen, staring off into space for lack of a single customer.

It was my intuition that there was business to be gained in custom-leather furnishings that led me to Philadelphia  , and it was there at that convention that my intuition proved accurate. One area of business that customers kept asking me about was whether or not I supplied leather for desks. Not at that very moment I didn’t, I told them, but I was more than determined I would be soon!

Since that day, my company has sold many thousands of custom-made leather desktops from coast to coast in different colors and tooling designs. Black, rust, chestnut, oxblood, DK green, camel, and wine are just some of the 10 colors we carry. We also have over twenty patterns we can roll on our desktop leathers. With instructions included, we lay down the leather employing a process that utilizes wallpaper paste, which is mild enough that it allows you to put the piece of leather into place without wrinkling it, or otherwise stressing it.

Leather has the ability to “breathe”. For the very reason we wear leather on our feet it allows water to pass through it thus allowing the wallpaper paste to dissipate leaving a strong bond and adhering perfectly to the wooden desk.

With the proper amount of heat and “dwell time” (the rate by which we roll the gold patterns on to the leather), we’ve been able to design and fabricate desktops of unique beauty and grace that are prized throughout the consumer market. The leather we use for our desktop program is of course our very own Andrew Muirhead Fine Scottish Leather tanned and finished in Glasgow Scotland: a very important ingredient to our recipe.

Customized Leather Desktops have become an important part of our trade at DCT Leathers. Who would have thought, as I stood there at the Fort Washington convention center near Philadelphia at a woodworking symposium, that in a few short years my company would be selling leather desktops to some of the best woodworkers and furniture restorers in North America?

Toronto’s Leather Trade: a Glance Back and a Glimpse Forward

There was a fairly recent time in Toronto’s history, believe it or not, when Toronto had the nickname of “Hogtown.” Named by the rest of Canada because Toronto was home to a large pig and cow abattoir and, of course, for its daily dominance in the news about everything.  The tannery I first worked at chemically treated cowhide from the abattoir to be transformed eventually into any number of leather-based goods. Anything from patent leather shoes, to Doc Martins, to saddles, boots, belts, wallets, and mil-spec leather were made in these old brick buildings by old-name companies, some of them dating back to the mid- to late-19th century. To get a sense of just how recently the leather industry has evaporated from the city, pigskin was used by shoe factories to make “Hush Puppies.” Remember those?

Having decades of experience in this trade, we at DCT Leather can attest to the massive changes that the city has undergone within our own lifetimes. Back when we were just getting started in the leather business, tanneries were still a surefire means of procuring oneself a profitable living in the big city. Starting off in the 1970s, while working in a tannery that did waterproofing for leather work boots, I found myself in an environment that, as someone else aptly put it, felt straight out of a Charles Dickens novel.  Everything from the stench of the actual tanning facility, a stench that literally hadn’t changed since the Stone Age, to the archaic wooden desks, chairs, and clocks that stood about the office: everything suggested a sense of timelessness that would never require substitution.

Of course, that didn’t turn out to be the case. At least three critical transformations shook Toronto’s tanning manufacturing facilities, forcing them either to shut their doors or to relocate abroad. The first change that came (a change which already feels outdated in of itself) was the fax machine. People who were buying leather for shoes no longer needed to deal with a local importer for proximity’s sake. They could simply fax an order to, say, China, and request “The next seasons order of children women and men’s’ shoes or boots.” The fact that East Asian labor was so cheap didn’t allow local businesses to compete. The cost of shipping a container of shoes long-distance was still far less than North American labor needed to produce these products.

The second development was the perfection of international delivery services like FedEx and UPS. Prior to these shipping companies becoming global juggernauts, it was safe for a Canadian tannery to have a turnaround time that involved getting back to or delivering goods to a customer by the end of the week. With the advent of overnight shipping, came a turnaround time where one simply didn’t have time to catch one’s breath. Not only could one fax one’s orders to China within seconds, but one could receive one’s smaller orders from China (or Vietnam, India, the Philippines, etc.) within the matter of a few long hours. Overseas suddenly became overnight.

While all this was going on the environmental issues from the processing became more severe as you could no longer wash out your tanning drums or let the toxins make there way up the chimneys. The tanneries could not keep up with the rules and regulations of the 21st century. By this time, our tannery was owned by a larger company in Milwaukee and it met its demise taking our tannery with it.

Toronto is still called “Hogtown” but not because of the abattoir and tangent trades. Today, the former tanneries along the waterfront are being redeveloped into up-scale bohemian lofts and apartments.  But just a few short years ago, an entirely different world flourished, and then vanished here.

Know the Type of Leather, Know the Type of Company

At DCT Leathers, we are oftentimes approached by a potential customer with a request that goes something along the lines of, “Do you make leather garments?” To which we have to reply regretfully that no, we don’t manufacture anything. Rather, we import hides for upholstery, desktop leather, automotive leather, or aircraft leather. But what we can help such prospective customers with is a dose of helpful knowledge that may allow them to differentiate between different types of leather and leather manufacturers; to separate the sheepskins from the goatskins, as it were.

As we’ve said before, the leather industry has been around since the very beginning, or at least since the very beginning of animal hunting and hide-wearing. Tanneries have flourished throughout history on all inhabitable continents. Frequently these tanneries have been utterly independent and unaware of each other, and have made use of very different types of animals in their tanning process.

All animal leathers have what we’ll call their own “personality,” i.e. their own commercial utility. For example, lambskin traditionally yields excellent material for softer garments. Kangaroo leather is strong and thin and as a result is relatively expensive. Kangaroo leather, in particular, on account of its lightweight flexibility as well as sturdiness, is used for high end professional sport shoes including golf and NFL footwear.

Of course, the most commonly used type of leather in the world is cowhide. Even here, the differences between various types of cowhide vary extraordinarily. Many North American cattle, for example, have hardier and thicker coats on account of the harsher winters on this continent, and are ideal for leather shoes and boots. That being said, if one purchased cowhides from, say, Florida or the Carolinas, one would get leather from cattle raised in easier, warmer climates. Thereby, such cattle with thinner hides would better be used in garments or furniture.

At DCT, the leather we work with comes from Andrew Muirhead of Scotland. On account of Europe’s relatively moderate climate, the cattle that range there have the perfect hides that are larger with less natural defects for a high-value product such as cushion seating in aircraft leather, or the leather trimming that stretches across an office desktop.

Our belief is that if customers realize the different types of leather that tanneries specialize in, it will inform their decision that much more accurately. On that note, we wish shoe manufacturers or garment makers all the best in their business, but we’re currently supplying automobile, furniture and aviation manufacturers with Fine Scottish Leather.

Know the animal, know the company.

A Brief History of Leather and Recycling

Many people think of recycling as a wholly modern concept. Recycling as people define it today is tied into an “awareness” of the need to provide sustainable solutions for a planet with a growing human population and with shrinking natural resources to meet their needs; a purely 20th and 21st century quandary. But even a brief glimpse into history shows us that this is not the case; that present circumstances are not some lone exception. One need only look at the leather industry to see that recycling and sustainability are truly ancient concepts.

The history of leather is synonymous with the history of recycling. Primitive hunters who stalked their game on the Paleolithic plains made use of animals not only for their meat, but also for their hides, bones, and entrails. Few, if any, parts went to waste. Even in 19th and early 20th century slaughterhouses (“abattoirs”), every part of the animal was used, besides, of course, the manure. Soap was one of the major by-products that came from animals butchered for their meat; and – of course – animal hides.

Today environmental regulations in North American tanneries are fairly strict (and fairly so). The pollutants long associated with the full harvesting of animal by-products have been left to other continents to gather. Many of the famous 100 year-old tanneries of Canada, Europe and the United States went belly up in the 1980s and 90s due to the increased pressure of environmentally aware laws.  But some tanneries have been adaptively smart enough both to maintain their business and follow more eco-friendly strictures. We at DCT Leathers have been fortunate enough to partner with one such tannery in Scotland.

Our Scottish friends were not only able to follow the strenuous environmental regulations of the United Kingdom, but were able to do so in a manner that allowed their tannery to flourish and prosper when so many others were forced abroad. We at DCT Leathers are proud to procure our primary leatherwork from Scotland to manufacture everything from desktop leather to car upholstery. Not only is the quality of their leather absolutely world-class, but the stringent ethical policies they uphold are those we ourselves hold dear.  We look forward to a greater effort on the part of the global tanning industry at large in following the lead of our friends in Scotland: masters of their craft, and practitioners of a tanning tradition that finds its roots in none other than the beginning of human history.