Since its publication of a carbon footprint report in 2021 that showed leather in a poor light, shoe company Veja has worked hard to improve its knowledge of the leather value chain, with encouraging results.

Footwear brand Veja has had something of a change of heart on leather. Last year, the Paris-based brand published a detailed report on its carbon footprint. It said that the raw materials it uses to make its shoes contribute 71% of its total carbon footprint. It went on to say that leather accounts for 97% of the impact of all of its raw materials.

Based on this, Veja said it had decided to reduce the presence of leather in its collections. It pointed out that, while 70% of the shoes in its autumn-winter collection in 2019 contained leather, the corresponding figure for autumn-winter 2020 was 51%.

In its calculations, it found that 70% of the carbon footprint that it attributes to leather occurs upstream in the supply chain, mostly from cattle farming. It attributed the remaining 30% to leather production and transportation. We argued in an article in our Leather and the Circular Economy section in World Leather August-September 2021 that it was unfair for Veja to attribute to leather such a large carbon footprint from cattle farming and that its figures for leather production and transportation also seemed implausibly high.

To its credit, the company responded to questions and shared a generous amount of information in its attempts to explain its numbers, but it also seemed slightly aggrieved at our unasked-for analysis and appeared determined to go ahead with its move away from leather.

Strong ties to Brazil

In truth, it was something of a surprise to learn that Veja would be one of the companies to feature on the programme at the Sustainable Leather Forum in Paris in September this year. On the day, however, Veja’s tone was positive and it was encouraging to hear it talk in detail about its supply chain commitments, including its ongoing commitment to sourcing leather.

Since 2004, when co-founders Sébastien Kopp and François-Ghislain Morillion decided to set Veja up, the brand’s ties to Brazil have been strong. They set out to make athletic-style shoes in keeping with fair-trade principles and decided to use leather, organic cotton and natural rubber. Brazil seemed a good source of all three key materials and they began building up their relationships with suppliers in the South American country from there.

This includes manufacturing of the finished product, which they have put into the hands of partners in the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul. It established its ties to its main partner there in 2013 and, even though growth has led it to enlist the help of other shoe producers in the same part of Brazil, it still entrusted around 60% of its total output to the original factory in 2020, and Brazil is still the country of origin of all of its shoes.

Fair conditions

As part of its commitment to transparency, Veja has published comparisons it has made between the treatment of footwear factory workers in Rio Grande do Sul and their counterparts in south-east Asia, where, it points out, 95% of the world’s sneakers are made now. Factories in Brazil offer a much higher social added value, the French brand has concluded. Factory owners respect the norms of the International Labour Organisation and the Brazilian workers who make its shoes have a 40-hour week, weekends off, a pension programme and four weeks’ annual holiday.

Veja contrasts this with figures its research has thrown up of factory workers in China enduring shifts of 16 hours per day or more, a six-day working week and an hourly pay rate equivalent to €0.55.

Agricultural attitude

Co-founder François-Ghislain Morillion says he likes to think of Veja as “an agricultural brand” because it has always sought to work closely with suppliers who live and work in an agricultural setting and spends a lot of time with them.

It has 22 people working in its sourcing team, which is 22 more than it has working in marketing. It has six people working for it in Amazon regions to maintain its relationship with the growers of the Hevea brasiliensis trees that supply rubber for Veja soles. It has another four people in the north-east of Brazil who carry out a similar role with producers of the organic cotton fibre that goes into the laces and linings. Mr Morillion is proud of what this strategy has achieved so far. He says: “We started with small projects, ones that were just getting off the ground and, initially, we had, for rubber, 48 producers. Now we source our rubber from more than 1,200 families who have formed themselves into a collective. We don’t buy from individual suppliers. We buy from the co-operative, which represents the families. This is part of our strategy of seeking to have the biggest and most positive impact possible on communities.”

While the situation with cotton-growers is similar, the Veja co-founder admits that the brand has made less progress with the leather supply chain. “There are several reasons for that,” Mr Morillion continues, “but one of the most important, and I’m not using this as an excuse, is that the leather supply chain is more complex and more opaque. Leather is a by-product of the meat industry and there are operators in the meat industry who would clearly rather not have us poke our noses into their affairs.”

In spite of covid-19, it recently embarked on an exercise to try to put right this comparative lack of progress on leather. Its partner tanneries are in Rio Grande do Sul, too, and during a recent visit to those tanneries it attempted once more to go to the farms that raise the cattle whose hides end up in the leather Veja uses. What happened during those farm visits caused initial concern at the company and probably confirmed some of the ‘leave leather’ sentiment that came across in the carbon footprint report. Curiously, though, in the end this experience led to much more positive outcomes for the brand’s attitude to leather, with Mr Morillion even talking about a 180-degree shift.

Fuller engagement

He acknowledges without hesitation that if the brand’s rapport with leather and the leather supply chain had fallen short of the closeness it has achieved in cotton and in rubber, the publication in 2021 of its carbon footprint figures did nothing whatsoever to improve the situation. “Yes, there was a bit of noise at the time,” François-Ghislain Morillion says now, “because the people in the leather industry were not at all happy about what we published.”

He goes on to say, however, that responses suggesting Veja had decided to end its use of leather overnight were unfair and inaccurate. Instead, he says the work the company did in preparing the 2021 report convinced it that, no matter how hostile the reception it had received from meat companies in the past, the new round of visits to tanneries and farms was essential because it realised that it had to engage more fully with its leather value chain. 

Veja remains committed to pursuing alternatives, for example, making non-leather uppers by using the organic cotton fibres it already sources to make a canvas shoe-upper fabric and then coating it. “We want to develop our offering in this area,” he says, “for customers who do not want to use leather. But we are committed to becoming better at working with our leather supply chain too and to get to know it better.”

On home soil

To this end, Veja’s impact and compliance manager, Ligia Zottin, who is from Brazil but is based at company headquarters, travelled back to her homeland to try once again to gain in-depth insight into leather. In the course of this, Marlon Backes, a leather expert that Veja employs in Rio Grande do Sul, joined her on a visit to a cattle farm in the interior of São Paulo state. 

Everything began well, with the family that ran the farm delighted that someone had travelled all the way from France to see their operation. “They showed us how efficient the process was, with the animals being born and raised on the farm,” Ms Zottin recalls, “and just when we decided we had seen enough, we noticed that there were 20 or 30 animals that were different from the others. We asked why and the farmer told us they were animals that had just arrived from Altamira.” This stopped the Veja team in its tracks. For Brazilians, Ms Zottin explains, Altamira, a place in Pará state in the far north-east, is closely associated with deforestation.

“And at that moment,” she explains, “we decided we could not continue sourcing from this region because there was a risk. We were hiring people in the Amazon because we want them to talk to families there and explain we are committed to forest protection; it did not make sense to continue buying hides from a region where there was this risk of contributing, indirectly, to deforestation.”

But all was not lost. Tipped off about cattle with zero-risk of being linked to deforestation there, the team decided to start sourcing hides from the far south-east of Brazil and from Uruguay instead. Veja staff in Rio Grande do Sul began an exercise of not just buying hides from the south-eastern part of the state, close to the border with Uruguay, but to get to know some of the farmers as well. One relationship, with farmer Victor Wortmann, has blossomed to such an extent that he joined the Veja team on stage at the Sustainable Leather Forum in Paris.

Pride of the Pampas

Mr Wortmann farms at a ranch called Estância Coxilha, not far from Quaraí and the border with Uruguay, 600 kilometres south of Porto Alegre. The land here in the far south is part of the Pampas, the fertile grasslands that cover this region, part of Argentina and the whole of Uruguay. For almost four centuries, this land has been used as pasture for raising cattle. The only trees in sight are eucalyptus, planted relatively recently to provide shade for the cattle when the sun is at its fiercest.

Estância Coxilha specialises in Braford cattle, a cross between Herefords and Brahmans, and Corriedale sheep. From birth to abattoir, these animals spend their entire lives on the farm, are 100% grass-fed and treated in keeping with all animal welfare requirements. “This gives us control,” Mr Wortmann says, “and allows us to guarantee the origin of the meat, wool, hides and skins we produce.” He leaves 90% of the land on the farm – into which he says you could fit half of Paris – completely untouched, making it a haven for fauna and insects of all kinds. The processes are regenerative, he explains, because the presence of the ruminants on the land, tramping organic matter into the ground as they move from place to place, leads to “constant regeneration of the undergrowth and enriching of the soil in a natural cycle”.

Victor Wortmann represents the third generation of his family to lead operations at Estância Coxilha. His grandfather bought a first plot of land and founded the farm in 1959 and his father later took over. He says he approaches his work as “a mission to honour the history and the heritage” of the people in whose footsteps he is following. This means upholding their commitment to transparency, animal welfare, social issues and the environment, and to delivering meat, hides, wool and other by-products “that people can trust”. Nothing bad can happen to this part of the Pampas while his family in charge, he insists.

Turn to the south

The ongoing Estância Coxilha project has made a positive impression on Veja. After meeting Victor Wortmann, hearing his story and visiting his farm, the footwear brand decided that it could and would continue to use leather and to source it from tanneries in Brazil provided it can use hides from farms such as this. “When you have people like Victor, working in the way he works,” François-Ghislain Morillion says, “all you can do is tell yourself that you have to change from what you were doing before and move to this.”

It was this that led Veja to make what he describes as its 180-degree turn on leather sourcing: no more sourcing hides in the central and eastern parts of Brazil because of the risks of being inadvertently implicated in deforestation. “We’ve never sourced hides in the Amazon, but when you buy from someone who buys from someone who buys from someone else, you can end up with material from the Amazon,” he explains. “Working with farmers like Victor and others in the same region, you can see that the cattle are from European breeds that no one could raise in the Amazon biome because it’s too hot there.”

Veja has found a way of restoring faith in its leather supply chain by turning its gaze southwards.

Braford cattle on Pampas pasture land at Estância Coxilha in Rio Grande do Sul.
Credit: Victor Wortmann

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