Olivenleder

Eine Revolution! Olivenleder ist gut für Mensch und Umwelt. Jede Art von Leder. Vollständig biologisch abbaubar. Ziemlich sehr gut.

Ein pflanzlicher Gerbstoff, gänzlich frei von Schadstoffen, für die Herstellung von wunderschönem, gesundem Leder.

13/05/2026

My son took a piece of leather to school this morning.
His teacher has a moth problem.

Richard is 10. Yesterday his teacher mentioned moths in her closet.

This morning he grabbed a piece of chestnut-tanned leather from our shelf and said he’ll need it today.

The leather came from Eugenia Presot, who runs Conceria Presot in Porcia – family tannery since 1932. When she gave us the scraps, she said: „Put a piece in your closet. Keeps the moths away. We’ve always done it.“

Richard remembered.

He wanted to tell his class:
The leather was tanned with chestnut extract. The tannin comes from the wood. And no, nobody cuts down forests for it. Chestnut trees are coppiced. You cut them back, and they grow back stronger.

Those tannins are hard for insects to digest. A natural defence against fungi, bacteria, and insects. And when you tan leather with it, those properties stay in the material. No chemicals, just tannins.

Bet you didn’t know that either?
You’re welcome.

Richard’s Little Leather School.

09/05/2026

Four weeks ago I posted about a piece of leather Mike brought me from Amsterdam.

Now it’s a pair of boots.

Made by Herr Geiger – a family workshop in Frittlingen that has been making shoes by hand since 1900. The wall behind him tells you what he does. Postcards from customers who hiked thousands of kilometers in his shoes and wrote back to thank him. One sent a wooden disc with a pilgrim shell – „2500 km ohne Blasen.“ Another a photo from somewhere far.

This is what I keep coming back to: leather lasts long enough to build relationships around it. Plastic doesn’t generate postcards.

The boots are made from Jesse – Olivenleder, milled, veg-tanned, no chrome. Herr Geiger worked with the leather like he’s worked with leather for decades. No drama, no special instructions. It just behaved like good leather should.

First time I put them on, I expected the usual break-in stiffness from new hiking boots. There wasn’t any. I’ve worn a lot of hiking boots over the years. These are different. Like the leather was already on my side.

Walking them in slowly. The terrain comes later.

06/05/2026

Leather is loud. Plastic is terrifyingly quiet.

An animal raised for food feels brutal, even when it’s honest.
Plastic pollution feels accidental, even when it’s devastating.

We banned plastic straws. But we still wear plastic jackets.
Make it make sense.

Here’s what gets lost in the emotion: animals are raised for food – not for leather. The hide is a low-value by-product. 134 million hides are wasted globally every year (LHCA, 2024) – buried or burned. That’s 40% of all cattle hides that never become leather.

Plastic feels different. Its damage is real but it happens elsewhere. Later. Far from where we make our choices. Microplastics accumulate quietly – in water, in soil, in us. We call it unintentional.

This isn’t about emotion versus reason.
It’s about proximity.

Leather makes consequences visible.
Plastic lets them drift away in space and time.

So maybe the real question isn’t why leather makes people uneasy.
Maybe it’s why so many of us have learned to look away from plastic.

09/04/2026

This is Jesse.

Not a person – a leather. Olivenleder®️ Jesse. Milled. Soft. Full Vegtan leather, tanned with olive tree pruning extract.

When Mike from showed me the milled version, I couldn’t stop touching it. That grain, that texture – it’s the kind of leather that makes you want to build a bag around it. Or a pair of shoes. Something that deserves to be seen and used every day.

Milling breaks the fibres just enough to give the leather a beautiful natural tumbled grain. Soft but with structure. Relaxed but not floppy. The kind of hand feel that makes people ask: what is this?

And the answer is simple: a byproduct hide, tanned with a byproduct from the olive harvest. No chrome. No heavy metals. No synthetic chemistry. Just plants meeting leather.

Mike runs from Amsterdam – 160+ years of family experience in the leather trade. The kind of guy who picks up a hide and tells you its life story. If you’re looking for clean, premium vegtan leather for your next project – he’s your man.

🫒 Olivenleder®️ – proudly natural by Silvateam

03/04/2026

An Earth Award for replacing a natural, biodegradable material with petroleum-based plastic? I’d love to understand the logic.

I’ve been sitting with this for a few days. I don’t want to take anything away from someone’s success, and I don’t want this to come across as envy.

But when TIME Magazine posts a video on LinkedIn showing cattle while claiming that animals are killed for handbags, and then celebrates Stella McCartney’s Earth Award on Instagram to over 12 million followers, where she states that „billions of animals are slaughtered in the name of luxury, for handbags and shoes and jackets“ and that „toxic chemicals used in leather tanning seep into rivers and into human bodies,“ I can’t stay quiet.

No cow, sheep, or goat on this planet is killed for a handbag. That’s more than 99% of all animals used for leather. They are killed for meat. The hide is a byproduct. If it isn’t turned into leather, it becomes waste, rotting in landfills and creating even bigger environmental problems.

She’s not entirely wrong about the chemicals. Parts of this industry have real problems. But this same industry has developed solutions that don’t cause these problems. Not as a marketing move, but because millions of hides need to be processed responsibly. That pressure forced innovation: Metal-free tanning, plant-based tanning agents, closed-loop water systems. These exist today.

And has anyone looked at what goes into making polyester? Petroleum extraction, antimony trioxide as a catalyst, ethylene glycol, microplastic shedding with every wash. None of that seeps into rivers and the sea?

Her online shop. A handbag. £1,695. Main material: 100% polyester. That’s plastic. Luxury plastic, but plastic.

I respect the vision. I respect the search for alternatives. But as long as the actual products on the shelf are made of plastic at luxury prices while natural, biodegradable materials are being vilified on a stage in front of the world, something is deeply off.

22/03/2026

Dear Mr. Galliano, congratulations on the Zara partnership. Everyone is talking about what you’ll do with the cuts, the silhouettes, the drama. But what will it all be made of?

Zara’s archive is built on polyester. You know this. You’ve spent your career working with the finest materials in the world – silk, wool, leather – that took months to develop. You understand what a material does to a garment better than almost anyone alive.

Now you have something no designer has ever had: two years, a global stage, and the attention of an industry that copies everything Zara does within weeks. If you put natural materials into those collections like wool, linen, h**p, leather... – that decision echoes through every supply chain that watches Zara.

One collection in polyester is fashion. One collection in natural materials is a message.

You said this partnership is „really sustainable from a creative point of view.“ I’d love to see it become sustainable from a material point of view too.

With respect from someone who spends his days working on what’s inside the leather, not what’s on the outside.

02/03/2026

We’re not buying a new school bag.

Our son is switching schools after summer.
Most of his classmates will get a new one.
He won’t – and that’s his choice.
We’d buy him one if he wanted. He doesn’t.

The leather satchel he’s been carrying since first grade still looks and works like it should. A few water marks from rain and a leaking bottle – that’s it.
No broken zippers, no peeling fabric, no faded prints.
Just leather doing what leather does: getting better with time.

I know – leather school bags aren’t the easy choice.
No dinosaur prints, no superhero patches.
The colourful alternatives are hard to compete with when you’re six.
We made the decision early and he never looked back.
That’s not for everyone, and that’s fine.

Yes, I work in leather – so take this with a grain of salt.
But I bought this bag as a father, not as a salesman.

If you’re about to buy a school bag this Easter – for first grade or for a school change – maybe consider this: the most sustainable bag is the one you don’t replace.

My son gets smarter.
I get greyer.
The leather bag gets richer.

💚

24/02/2026

Nobody raised a cow for this.
My dog would disagree – but this cattle ear is a byproduct.

A piece of the animal that just comes along for the ride.
Like sawdust comes with woodworking.
Like lemon peel comes with juice.

The same logic applies to leather.

The hide makes up about 1% of a cattle’s total value.
One percent. No farmer in the world breeds cattle for their skin.
The skin is there because the animal is there.

The question is only: what do we do with it?

I made this carousel to explain the basics – what a byproduct actually is, where leather fits in, and why the economics make the argument better than any opinion ever could.

Swipe through. Share it if you think it’s useful.
And if you disagree – tell me why. I’d rather have an honest conversation than a quiet feed.

Maybe the next episode of my little leatherschool: Why some people say leather isn’t a byproduct at all – and why that debate matters.

By the way: We tan a byproduct with a byproduct. Leather from cattle hides, tanned with olive tree pruning.

20/02/2026

The cool people work in leather.  Or wear it. Or both. 
After a very full leather week visiting tanneries in Italy, talking to tanners, touching hides, eating too well – I’m heading into the weekend grateful for this job. 
What I noticed in 4 tanneries over the past ten days:  the tanners who are rethinking their chemistry are the ones with the most energy right now. Something is shifting. 

12/02/2026

Lineapelle, Milan, today.

Still talking about leather.
Still talking about how we tan it.

If you’re around, I’m up for a quick chat.
See you – here, or in fall at the Silvateam stand at Lineapelle.

Olive pruning. Chestnut. Quebracho.
The only renewable way forward.

💚

Olivenleder®
proudly natural by Silvateam s.p.a.

Adresse

Pfullingen

Telefon

+49712116230

Webseite

http://www.olivenleder.de/

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