Designers need to pick a side
The chief executive of Arzignano-based leather manufacturer Gruppo Mastrotto has some straight-talking advice for young designers.
Talented young people coming into fashion design have a choice to make, according to leather industry leader Chiara Mastrotto. They need to take a clear position regarding the materials they want to work with when creating their collections of shoes, clothes and accessories. Is their preference to use materials derived from fossil fuels or renewable ones? She thinks most designers would pick the renewable option and this leads her to suggest that leather should be a prime contender for inclusion among the materials they source. She made the comments to the organisers of Première Vision in the build-up to the most recent edition of the event this February.
Ms Mastrotto has all the sympathy in the world for people with a passion for the planet because she shares it. She climbs mountains in her spare time. One of her heroes is South Tyrol-born adventurer, author and former Green Party politician Reinhold Messner (the first person to complete a solo ascent of Mount Everest), and she insists that she takes inspiration from nature every day.
For her, this is entirely in keeping with her work in leading a global leather manufacturing group that employs more than 2,000 people, has factories in her native Veneto, in Tuscany, as well as in Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia and Tunisia. In a logistics hub it calls Gruppo Mastrotto Express, the company keeps a stock of finished leather in 1,500 colours for quick delivery to customers in 120 countries around the world.
Family business
Gruppo Mastrotto has been making leather since 1958. The company was founded by Arciso Mastrotto and was then developed by his sons Bruno and Santo. It is now led by a new generation: Chiara and Graziano Mastrotto, respectively president and vice-president of the group.
She says sustainable development has been at the core of her strategy from the outset. Fruits of this so far include the Green Leather Industry for the Environment (greenLIFE) project, which launched in 2014 as a joint initiative with another Arzignano-based tanning group, Gruppo Dani, and three technical partners. This project won partial funding from the European Union and ran for three years, promoting sustainability in the wider tanning industry.
In 2021, Gruppo Mastrotto published its first dedicated sustainability report and declared that all of the electricity it uses from now on will come from 100% renewable sources. Last year, it announced that it was able to label its finished leather as carbon-neutral after reducing or offsetting its emissions.
It followed this up with the announcement that it is to take part in the United Nations Global Compact, which the UN refers to as the world’s largest corporate sustainability initiative. More than 15,000 companies around the world and 4,000 non-business organisations are involved in the programme, which the UN launched at the start of the new millennium. Participating companies have to commit to ten clearly defined principles to support corporate sustainability, with these principles coming from established UN treaties on human rights, labour, environmental matters and anti-corruption. Company leaders need to commit to bringing these principles into all aspects of the business, to share progress transparently and to support wider UN initiatives, including the 17 Sustainable Development Goals.
Labels that enable
Another milestone that Chiara Mastrotto is proud of is that the group was able to present three of the collections it introduced in 2022 as certified bio-based, using a classification system set out by the US Department of Agriculture. She believes the group secured a leather-industry first with this. Other certification programmes it has engaged with include Blue Angel, the Leather Working Group and Oeko-Tex. For Ms Mastrotto, what is important is that these labels be based on a “robust, objective and verifiable scientific methodology”, and on data. This, she insists, is the best way to avoid unfair competition.
But labels should make it possible for buyers to have information about the environmental and social characteristics of any product, she believes. She wonders about the tendency to focus only on greenhouse gases and the related numbers, “with no desire to understand what is behind those numbers”.
Scrap value
At the end of last year, the group enhanced its circular-economy credentials further by introducing Reviva. This material is the result of a project that uses finished leather scraps and offcuts that are normally considered waste. This is an excellent solution, the chief executive says, to the challenge of putting leftover material to good use.
“We love leather because it is a natural product and part of the circular economy,” she explains. “And it’s important to keep clarifying this. Leather is a by-product of the food industry that we process and ennoble by creating beautiful material. We start with hides and create a material that our customers can then use to create bags, shoes, home materials and automotive interiors.”
Inclusion zone
She adds that sustainable fashion should mean diversity as well as circularity and carbon neutrality. Here, too, Gruppo Mastrotto has taken action. People from 36 countries make up its workforce, the percentage of women is above 30% and it has what Chiara Mastrotto calls “a perfect 50-50” in the boardroom. Its commitment to inclusion extends to a special project inside the group in which a team of five employees, all of whom have a disability, create colour charts that go to customers around the world to promote the Gruppo Mastrotto Express service.
In 2023, she wants to continue to roll out the group’s sustainability plans at a fast pace and for this to deliver the results she wants to achieve.
No revolution required
Another aim is to help improve the way the industry communicates with the outside world about leather. “Its beauty, naturalness, durability and comfort make leather a unique material,” she says, “and an excellent example of the circular economy. The whole value chain must make an effort to explain these characteristic to the end consumer. We should be proud of our economic, environmental and social importance as a sector and we have to find the best way to make our communication more effective.”
She says she believes in the wider fashion sector’s ability to help promote sustainable development. This need not require a revolution, according to Chiara Mastrotto. What she calls “a structural evolution” should be enough to bring about a business model that takes account of the environment in its strategic decision-making and operations. This should run deeply in companies and across the value chain, she insists. And as a sector, she thinks leather can play a strategic role. “We can make a great contribution,” she explains, “because we upcycle a by-product of the food industry and we create a long-lasting material that designers can use to create their products.”
This is where the stark choice for designers comes in. They need to pick a side.
A unique material. Finished leather from Gruppo Mastrotto.
Credit: Gruppo Mastrotto
