Leather and the consumer
We would like to share a research report that can be found on the website of Leather Naturally about purchase behaviors towards leather.
In nowadays´s environmental context, people are being encouraged to make better choices to protect the future of the planet. And yet, the final end consumer does not always pick highly durable material such as genuine leather but decide to go for alternatives called “vegan”.
Please find below a brief summary of their survey on 2,000 UK adults:
To put it in a nutshell, we would like to stress out the importance of having all the information before purchasing any item. We won´t repeat it enough: genuine leather is a sub-product of the food industry. Animals are not raised for their hides. Many organisations take advantage of this confusion to drive anti-leather sentiment and to encourage the purchase of alternative materials that in some cases can cause considerable environmental harm because they are made of petroleum. The use of the term “vegan leather” deliberately leads to confusion due to marketing strategies put in place to reassure shoppers they are ‘doing the right thing”. We would like to see the term disappear from use in favour of the exact composition of the material being detailed.