What about Italian leather?

There isn’t anything particularly unique to Italian leather. Italian cows eat grass just as cows or steers in Argentina, Romania, USA or anyplace else. In fact most hides processed in Italian tanneries come from either South America or Eastern Europe as the byproduct of meat processing. It is very rare indeed that a steer or cow is slaughtered exclusively for its hide.

There are over 400 tanneries in Italy. The top escholn deploy sophisticated chemical engineering processes that produce impressive, high quality hides. But, there is no distinctive characteristic that separated Italian leather compared with the rest of the world. There are equally sophisticated tanneries in other countries throughout Europe and North America.

There are also factories that produce manufactured products like bonded or bicast leather, most of which are in the far east. These factories acquire the leather tailings or scraps from the leather goods manufacturing process of all sorts (for example, furniture, clothing, etc.). These are the unusable chunks of leather that have been cut away from the hide and left on the cutting room floor. They are swept up and sold by the pound (or kilo). This is the raw material for Bonded or manufactured leather products that are a blend of chopped up leather mixed with various epoxies (sort of like pressed wood) and sold to unexpecting consumers as leather.

So when you see the words “Italian leather”, realize it is marketing spin, that is nothing special with no distinctive value of its own right.