Tanning is simply the process that stops skin from rotting. Chrome does it in under a day with a salt solution and heavy chemistry. Plant tannins do it with bark, fruit and time — usually several weeks. Everything else follows from that difference.
Same job, completely different clock
A chrome tannery loads hides into a drum with chrome salts and salt, and can produce stable, usable leather the same afternoon. It is cheap, fast and consistent, which is why it became the industry default within a century.
A vegetable tannery rotates hides through a drum with oak, chestnut, mimosa or quebracho extract. The tannin binds slowly, so the cycle runs for weeks, and the operator decides week by week when the leather is ready rather than by timer. That is also why vegetable tanning smells the way it does.
- Chrome: pale, cool to the touch, uniform colour, stable from day one, takes dye and finish easily.
- Vegetable: warm and slightly firm at first, marked by the tannery's own colour, breaks in over months, keeps deepening for years.
Chrome stays still. Vegetable keeps moving.
A chrome hide is effectively finished when it leaves the drum. It holds its colour, it holds its surface, and the object you own in year five looks close to the object you bought. Good, if that is what you want.
A vegetable hide is still reacting for its whole life. It lightens where you hold it and darkens where it catches light, and the surface keeps drawing in oil. The risk people call risk is really just the absence of a fixed point, which is why vegetable leather gets described as living and chrome leather does not.
Chrome keeps a record frozen in time. Vegetable keeps a record open.
Neither process is innocent
Being honest about this matters more than picking a side. Conventional chrome tanning carries a genuinely heavy wastewater load, and in countries with weak enforcement that load reaches rivers. That is a real cost and we do not pretend otherwise.
Vegetable tanning uses far less hazardous chemistry per hide and mostly biodegradable plant inputs, but it consumes substantially more water and more time per hide, and it needs larger tannery infrastructure to run economically. We only buy from tanneries that treat their effluent properly and can show us the records.
- We buy vegetable-tanned because it suits the product we make, not because tanning method alone makes leather sustainable.
- We ask every tannery for current effluent treatment documentation before the first order.
- We buy less leather than we could: one grade, one specification, and offcuts returned to the workshop for small goods and repair.
Our material position, in full.
Tannery, grading, offcut policy and what we still have not solved. Written down so you can hold us to it.
Read our approachCamille Ferrand
Materials & quality
Spent a decade in a tannery quality lab before moving to the cutting table. Handles hide selection, tannery audits and everything that decides how a hide ages.
Keep reading
Black or natural leather: picking the colour you will still like in ten years
Colour is not a finish applied to leather, it is a decision about how the surface will behave. Here is how the three families of tone age, and which one fits the way you actually live.
Full grain, top grain, split: what the grading terms actually mean
“Genuine leather” is a legal floor, not a quality signal. Here is how hides are split and finished, which grades keep the fibre structure worth keeping, and what each one costs you later.