An entrepreneur in Mexico has become a champion of leather’s value as a perfect fit for slow fashion and for the circular economy.

A wood-scented childhood in a small village in Austria led Lisa Dobler to a love of craftsmanship. This led to a love of slow fashion and appreciation of artisan skills. By a roundabout route, this led her to fall in love with Mexico, make her home there and, in 2018, launch her own leathergoods business, Lebensstück.

She insisted on giving the company a German name, one that means ‘product for life’, but the business is rooted in the Bajío region of Mexico, with headquarters and one team of artisans in Santiago de Querétaro and a second production site 175 kilometres away in León, Guanajuato. “That’s where  all the tanners are,” she explains, “so it’s important for us to have a presence in Guanajuato.”

Lebensstück’s business model has three main strands: corporate products, bespoke accessories and education activities. For the first, the company has the capacity to produce more than 2,000 items per week. These products can be phone cases, office equipment or leather aprons stamped with a corporate logo. They can also be complimentary products for companies to hand out to their customers.

Jacket tribute

For the second strand, the capacity is around 300 pieces per week. These products involve detailed input from customers and, sometimes, digital rendering and the production of prototypes to make sure the finished product will meet the client’s needs in terms of design, colour, finishing and other features. Interesting recent examples include cases for the violinists in the state of Querétaro’s philharmonic orchestra and the unlikely challenge of turning a jacket made from elephant hide into cardholders.

Ms Dobler explains: “What happened was that a lady came to us following the death of her father. Among the possessions the gentleman had left behind was a favourite jacket made from elephant leather. There were a large number of grandchildren and, rather than try to decide which of them should inherit the jacket, the customer asked us if we could find a way to use the jacket to give each person a souvenir of their grandfather. We cut the jacket up and made card-holders, stamping the initials of a grandchild on each one of them.” Life products: the beloved jacket became something new to mark and celebrate the grandfather’s life.

Education activities take place at weekends with the aim of helping consumers understand leather and leather craftsmanship better. As part of this programme, artisans from many different parts of the country have travelled to Querétaro to share their knowledge and demonstrate their skills before an audience in the Lebensstück workshop. “People have a lot of questions,” she says, “and we try to answer them. This is a non-profit activity. It is part of our effort to have a positive social impact. There is no way to do business well without that.” The company’s founder regards this as especially important work owing to a lack of appreciation of leather among consumers, especially younger people. This predicament is afflicting Mexico as much as other parts of the western world, it seems, in spite of the country’s centuries-old connections to producing and working with leather.

Emotional value

Two people out of the total workforce of 21 at present are contributing to the customisation and the education efforts in a specialised way. They carry out repairs to products that customers love and would rather not throw away when a problem develops. In one instance, a man approached Lebensstück and asked if the team there could restore a 40-year-old pair of boots. His intention was not so much to start wearing them again, but to make them look beautiful once more. The boots had pride of place among this customer’s possessions because he bought them with his first wages. He left Mexico as a youth and crossed into the US, picking up work on construction sites; he made his life there, but returned to Mexico recently to run a small supermarket for a time before retiring. The boots are his Lebensstück, his life product.

Repair work on bags provides the company with frequent opportunities to explain to the public that synthetic straps have worn away or broken because of the inherent weaknesses in the material, and that replacing them with leather will give new and long-lasting life to the bags they love. Lisa Dobler makes interesting comments about synthetic materials in general, saying that presenting them as a kind of leather, as many brands insist on doing, constitutes a lie, one that many younger people in particular seem to fall for. “It’s partly our own fault,” she says. “This should be part of our communications strategy. Some of the tanners I’ve talked to about this insist that they have a business-to-business (B2B) focus and that putting a positive message across to consumers is more the responsibility of companies, including ours, that focus on business-to-consumer (B2C).”

A fight for every sale

She is on good terms with a number of prominent tanneries in Mexico, consulting with them, involving them in her seminar sessions and, of course, sourcing leather from them. She works with León-based Lefarc, Boxmark, Magnus Leather and Pieles Azteca as her main suppliers.

She admires Lefarc’s achievements in water-recycling and its insistence on sourcing the chemicals it uses from Europe. Boxmark’s ties to automotive group Volkswagen mean it must keep to international standards and achieve all the necessary certifications. Similarly, furniture specialist Magnus Leather works to US standards because that is where its main clients are, while Azteca’s varied colours and finishes, along with its success in becoming a supplier to the Mexico stores of a global coffee chain have also impressed her.

If they have common qualities, these leather manufacturers also face common challenges. Ms Dobler sums it up by saying too many millennial consumers, the demographic cohort to which she belongs, have turned away from leather. She calculates that leather manufacturers have invested little in marketing in the last 15 or 20 years “because it seemed there was no need”. Now, however, orders are much thinner on the ground.

“They are having to fight for every customer and for every sale,” she explains. Ideas that give her hope of improvement include a renewed focus on niche, higher-value collections of leather, finding ways of making it economically viable to process much smaller batches, perhaps using vegetable tanning methods. “It seems to me that the trend is moving away from mass production,” she adds, “and that the future will be something much more personalised. Here in Mexico, we have the people, the knowledge, the machinery and everything we need. We just need to work out where to go from here. We need to adapt.”

Counter-argument

This brings us back to the question of speaking up in defence of leather. Ms Dobler says the misinformation and untruthful marketing campaigns of anti-leather advocates are something she feels emotional about and that she is happy to contribute as best she can to the counter-argument. Unlike many leather manufacturing groups, Lebensstück is a newcomer to the industry. Its founder, who worked in project management in the automotive industry earlier in her professional life, talks of a path towards leather that may have been slow, but was also sure and clear.

It is not that Lisa Dobler woke up one morning and realised that she loved leather. She says her realisation was that she loved slow fashion and developed an interest in leather because it is a material that fits perfectly with slow fashion, just as it fits perfectly with the circular economy. She no longer wanted to feel compelled to buy new clothes constantly so as to stay on trend, whether she liked the trends or not.

Obvious parallels

“I have been a lover of leather since then, which is to say the last ten years,” she says. “I grew up in a very small village in the mountains in Austria, where my father worked as a carpenter. He worked with his hands, designed his products and discussed his ideas in detail with his customers, talking to them about different types of wood, each with different properties, different colour tones and so on, and then producing a draft design on a piece of paper. He would involve us in small ways, letting us help him tidy up his workshop at the weekend, breathe in the smell of the wood and see how he was taking each design idea forward through the different stages of the process.”

The parallels are obvious and she feels the connection strongly, talking of how meaningful it is to work with a material that humanity already has to hand and is renewable, making it into something that is high in quality and will become a product that will last a long time, perhaps a lifetime – a Lebensstück.

Lebensstück’s aim is to help consumers choose products they can cherish for life.
All credits: Lebensstück

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