Quality of lifestyle – innovative and sustainable leathers

Consumer trends change constantly in today's world; only elite tanneries have the resources necessary to consistently develop new lines of leathers, and new leathers provide brands with innovation and inspiration to meet the increasingly complex world of trends.

Beyond meeting complex customer trends, PrimeAsia's new leathers must take into account the challenges and opportunities of rapidly changing external costs, internal costs, environmental regulations, the availability of a trained labour force and raw materials. PrimeAsia evaluates all these factors using detailed data management systems while translating the PrimeAsia research and development team's innovative leather trends into reality.

PrimeAsia's research and development team focuses on identifying new trends, and translating those trends into leathers that target each brand's requirements. Each brand has individual trend needs. These needs are dependent on a brand's target categories. Target categories include athletic or casual footwear, the global region of sales and the end customers' backgrounds.

Making predictions

To determine what the future trends will be for footwear and accessories, the PrimeAsia team researches published media outlets such as fashion trends services, social-media outlets and magazine publications. The PrimeAsia team also communicates with brands directly to understand their future trend directives and the innovations they need. In addition to communicating with brands about trends, PrimeAsia communicates with suppliers to obtain technical support and collaborate on new leather innovations.

Modern leather innovations create new leather attributes or solve problems within the supply chain. Performance attribute improvements include topics such as oils, waxes, strength, abrasion, waterproofing and upgrade leather technologies. Additional leather trend updates include colours, embosses and weights. PrimeAsia collaborates with raw material, chemical and equipment suppliers during the process of developing new leathers. Trend identification is only the first step in the process of providing the future trends to PrimeAsia's brands.

All part of the process

The process of developing new PrimeAsia leathers must take into consideration increasingly stringent global and local environmental and social regulations, and the related internal and external cost management factors.

Asian governments are quickly moving towards stricter environmental regulations on par with the European Union and the US. Best-in-class global manufacturing companies now hold themselves to the same standards as their brands, meeting all global legislation on environmental and social requirements. Sustainable tanneries seek to reduce and eventually eliminate the environmental footprint of leather's manufacturing process by creating - as much as possible - closed-loop resource manufacturing.

The cost of purchasing resources is growing exponentially across the globe, as are the waste-disposal costs. Sludge disposal costs at PrimeAsia's tannery in China increased by 479% in the past five years. Increasing waste-disposal costs creates significant incentives to find new ways to manage waste disposal. PrimeAsia is now drying its sludge on site and then sending the dried waste to approved Chinese governmental sludge contractors.

Big data

To better understand the diverse range of internal and external costs that must be taken into account when new PrimeAsia leather is developed, data management is also of top importance.

PrimeAsia analyses data from all aspects of the business. Each PrimeAsia leather is individually given an environmental footprint number. The footprint number is the result of a formula calculating the energy, water and chemical usage required to produce the leather along with the resource hours it takes to manufacture the leather.

All PrimeAsia's equipment is monitored for efficiencies, and the company invests millions of dollars each year in new equipment to improve energy, water and chemical usage efficiencies. PrimeAsia also collects data about the workforce availability in the communities in which its tanneries are located, and the level of training and education attained by that workforce.

Workforce availability has decreased rapidly in the past few years, while liveable wages have increased by 50%, in the Asian countries in which PrimeAsia works. Not all tanneries provide liveable wages, calculate the cost of air emission and waste management systems, or focus on investing in new equipment to improve efficiencies and reduce usage of resources. The tanneries not calculating the above items will obviously be able to reduce the overall price of their leathers, but what are the long-term consequences of those decisions? Will those tanneries be allowed to continue operating in the future? Brands need to start considering whether these costs are measured in their leather purchases.

What is the cost?

In addition to environmental and labour costs, raw materials, including wet-blue and chemicals, must be available, and meet PrimeAsia's quality and restricted substance specifications. Wet-blue is available from a diverse range of global sources. Each wet-blue hide has its own physical aesthetic characteristics such as strength and abrasion, grain character and uniformity.

Several regional markets around the world determine the price of different types of wet-blue hides. Purchases of wet-blue often contain mixtures of grade qualities in the hides; varying grades of hides are often used to create different types of leathers. Higher-quality grades have a higher cost, but also allow for more of the finished leather hide to be cut and used in products due to fewer original features such as scratches or insect bites. Newly developed leathers have to contain the correct usage of raw materials, a low resource tannage and remain high in physical quality, while reducing overall manufacturing complexities.

New leathers employ smart engineering solutions wherever possible, as the company seeks to maximise quality while minimising cost. PrimeAsia Tannery's research and development teams create leather formulas and retannages that maximise the uptake of chemicals, create high yields and use less water and energy. Compact retannages are important because customers increasingly seek speed when choosing suppliers.

The raw material and processes must be carefully selected and efficiencies created to maximise the value to customers, all while minimising the environmental footprint. New grading package solutions, alternative raw materials and technologies all offer options to minimise cost, maximise impact and optimise value. PrimeAsia continues to push the limits of innovation during the raw material selection, retanning and finishing processes.

PrimeAsia ensures that all leathers meet the above environmental, quality and innovation standards by having a strict 'no compromise' management programme. Leathers that do not meet these standards are internally rejected and redesigned to ensure premium aesthetics. High-quality leather adds value to any footwear or accessory product. A new PrimeAsia leather must be part of an appropriate group of products that meet trend directives, priced to fit the marketplace, have a quantifiable environmental footprint and wherever possible involve smart engineering techniques.