Our latest issue of World Leather, February-March 2023, celebrates the important contributions that many leading women are making to the leather industry. We wanted to mark International Women’s Day on March 8 by highlighting this. Report by Leatherbiz.

A3 Leather Innovation Centre, University of Lleida, Catalonia

In the Leather Leaders section in this issue, our dialogue is with Debbie Burton, chair of Leather Naturally. She is the first woman to appear in this part of the magazine and she will not be the last.

In the technology section, which has a whole series of articles signaling the important increase in renewable content in leather chemicals, Olga Ballús is the contributor of one of the papers. She is the head of the leather application laboratory at leather chemicals producer Cromogenia-Units and a member of the board of AQEIC, Spain’s leather chemists’ association. She writes in World Leather about the connections between the increased use of bio-based materials in leather production and the industry’s circular-economy credentials.

And on that subject, this issue of the magazine’s dedicated Leather and the Circular Economy section features a number of very prominent women.

Chief executive of Gruppo Mastrotto, Chiara Mastrotto, has a clear message for young designers of bags, shoes and other fashion products. She points out that people in this community talk all the time about their commitment to renewability and the good of the planet. They need to recognise that leather fits in perfectly with this, unlike many of the alternative materials that are available to them to use, she argues.

With improved traceability and animal welfare an increasingly important component of the message about leather’s sustainability, we also have a detailed article in this section reflecting what animal welfare expert Dr Temple Grandin has said in a new book and in recent interviews about this. In the same article, Spoor’s director of business development, Birgitte Holgard Langer, and the founder of a leather start-up in Iowa, Danielle Dotzenrod, share their thoughts and experience of carrying Temple Grandin’s commitment to good treatment of animals forward in the leather supply chain.