Stahl India takes fashion to the tanners

The new collection has also been shown in private presentations made by the Stahl India local teams to many tanners and producers of finished leather products. The teams have worked with customers to recreate these fashion ideas on their own leathers and articles. The response has been fantastic so far, especially as there has been an important emphasis on how to upgrade the poorer leather quality often available locally in order to produce results that interest buyers from across the world. Upgrading low quality raw material has been a way of life for Indian tanners for the last few years. Today, more and more tanners are also producers of finished goods rather than selling the leather simply as leather. Many Indian tanners now make top quality shoes, garments and leathergoods for household brand names in Europe and the USA. The demand for these products is ever increasing. India is no longer a ‘me too' producer; it is being seen by many as the Italy of Asia. This means that tanners have to focus more on fashion than on some of the classic items they produced in the past. Today a tanner, who wants to sell finished products to large brands or department stores, has to prepare collections of leather textures, colours and styles for buyers who will send teams of designers to view, discuss and hopefully select some of them for commercial orders. These collections have to be made at least twice a year as well as meeting demands for information earlier each year as the brands try to get goods in the stores before their competitors. Stahl believe that upgrading and today's fashion leathers work perfectly together, as many of the hot items can be made on low-end material or redundant black crust, thereby turning non-moving stock into cash for the tanner. Around eighteen months ago Stahl established a Fashion Design Studio in Milan to provide support for customers around the world and for their applications laboratories, technical sales teams and manufacturing facilities located in the world's leather producing markets. The facilities, publications and advice provided by the studio have been an outstanding success for Stahl India, enabling the latest thoughts on fashion, colours, effects and much more to be brought direct from Stahl's fashion experts for presentation to the Indian leather industry. Stahl India are able to call on a wealth of fashion knowledge based on a deep understanding of the way in which fashion is related across the world and how it has been affected by fashion cycles over the years. A vast collection of photographs, illustrations, catalogues and books provides invaluable reference material for the studio to draw upon. Stahl India are now working with the Stahl Design Studio to produce their collections as early and as accurately as possible. The collection is not made in some distant studio by designers with no concept of leather manufacture; it is made by Stahl India's technicians from the main leather centres of the country. The articles are made in India, using products made in the company's plant in Ranipet and using information and ideas passed on from the Design Studio in Milan. Unless the local teams understand the collections and know how to make the leathers, they have little value, and this has been the focus of Stahl India's efforts. This is a really different approach, because tanners and producers in India have long had to suffer a disconnect between design ideas and the knowledge to make finished shoes, bags or garments. As would be expected, in line with Stahl's worldwide policy, all of the new ideas from the Design Studio and the Stahl Application Laboratories feature new technology to help meet the latest, more stringent safety, health and environment legislation and European requirements. The latest of these design ideas and the knowledge behind them has been made available to Stahl India's teams and their customers through the colour forecast for autumn and winter 2010 booklet, the colour forecast poster for the same season and the comprehensive Leather Fashion and Design book covering the spring and summer season 2009. These three publications are proving invaluable to designers and to leather and leather article manufacturers alike and are now being published regularly in the spring and autumn.