New York-based accessories and footwear group Tapestry has an extensive programme in place to build a business case for circularity while celebrating and enhancing the sustainability of leather.

The parent company of Coach, Kate Spade and Stuart Weitzman, Tapestry, has made it clear that it views leather as an important part of its business strategy. When it published its 2023-2024 results, it explained that it intends to grow the leathergoods category at Coach and “strengthen core handbag foundation” at Kate Spade. Meanwhile, at Stuart Weitzman, leather has always been a fundamental component of its high-end women’s footwear collections and this brand, too, is now expanding into handbags, as well as footwear for men.

For a number of years now, the group’s annual consumption of leather has been in excess of 100 million square-feet. Whether its attempts to acquire rival group Capri Holdings succeed or not, it is planning to take increase its leather sourcing substantially in the near future. Tapestry is plotting its path towards this increased investment in leather carefully. A detailed plan is in place to help it integrate the positive elements of leather’s story (the material’s circularity, longevity, renewability, versatility and beauty) into the way it presents its brands and collections to consumers. At the same time, the group is using its influence and working hard to make the leather value chain even more sustainable.

It aims, for example, to have traceability of 95% of its materials by next year. It wants to source a proportion of hides from farms using regenerative agricultural practices and it is committed to helping its suppliers of leather make better use of the waste that accrues from their operations. This is part of a broader focus on repair-and-recycle initiatives, all of which aim to enable companies that manufacture leather or leather products to make the maximum possible use of the material the industry processes. It had also set itself the goal of sourcing, by 2025, 97% of its leather from gold- or silver-rated Leather Working Group tanneries, but it achieved this ahead of schedule in 2023. Together, these ideas can help cement leather’s status as an ideal example of a material for the circular economy.

Baseline year

The group’s vice-president for sustainability, Logan Duran, gave a complete overview of these initiatives at Lineapelle in Milan in September 2024. A wide range of sustainability initiatives were already under way at Tapestry before this, but he marks 2021 as an important point in the road for the group. This was when it committed to making the targets it was setting itself science-based. Using 2021 as a baseline year, it has committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 64% for scopes one and two, which is to say emissions from its own facilities and from the energy those facilities consume, by 2030. The commitment also includes a 42% reduction of ‘non-FLAG’ scope-three emissions, again by 2030. FLAG stands for forestry, land and agriculture. Tapestry also has a separate target of reducing FLAG scope-three emissions by 30% by 2030, and an overall target of achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions across the value chain by 2050.

“We have seen some great progress already,” Mr Duran says. “We have achieved a 57% reduction for scopes one and two, helped by an adoption of around 80% of renewable energy in our stores, offices and fulfilment centres. Overall, our emissions are down since 2021, but over that time, our revenue has increased. We want to drive reductions in scope three and we want to do that partly through material innovation. But we will not compromise on the quality of our products. There is no sense making ugly products that no one is going to buy.”

He believes leather from regenerative agriculture practices will be part of this innovation, but points to other examples too. Kate Spade, for instance, has products that use recycled nylon and polyester fibres. He is also very supportive of work that Coachtopia, a new sub-brand that Coach launched in 2023, has done so far. “Coachtopia had circularity built in from the start,” he says.

Keep products out of landfill

Before that, in the summer of 2021, Tapestry had already introduced Coach (Re)Loved. It set up an exchange platform in its retail stores inviting customers who no longer wanted to use Coach bags they had bought to hand them over for the company to “reimagine or recycle” the products. In return, customers taking part receive a credit towards a new purchase. Tapestry describes the practice of fixing up pre-owned bags and selling them to new owners as ‘upcrafting’ and as an important means of keeping accessories it has produced out of landfill.

This has developed four distinct strands. Tapestry presents bags in the (Re)Loved programme as ‘Restored’ if they have undergone a repair at the hands of the in-house craftspeople, or as ‘Upcrafted’ in the case of a reimagining of the original product. In cases of bags that are beyond repair, the in-house team recycles the components into a new product, labelled ‘Remade’. For particularly attractive pre-owned products, it is using the tag ‘Vintage’. Because of the popularity of vintage products among many consumers now, Tapestry team members have begun searching in flea markets and other likely locations to source and preserve products for this category. In-house craftspeople repaired 63,000 products in 2023 and placed 11,000 of them in the (Re)Loved programme.

Years of use

 “Leather’s durability lends itself to all of this,” Logan Duran says. “And longevity reduces the annualised environmental impact over the lifetime of a product. Studies we have carried out with a team from Columbia University in New York suggest that we can assume our customers will use a new product for five years on average. If, after those five years, they have the product repaired, they can keep using it for another three years. People create lasting connections with products made from leather. Even ‘Remade’, when we take a product apart and make it into something new, leans into the intrinsic quality of leather.”

Suppliers’ use of wet blue off-cuts and waste from all stages of the supply chain, including cutting scraps from the factory floor, is providing Tapestry with material it is able to use in its circularity-focused Coachtopia sub-brand. Bags such as the Ergo and the Barrel are available in a material that contains  at least 50% recycled leather fibres. An important source of these fibres recycled from leather scraps is Gen Phoenix, a UK-based materials manufacturer in which Tapestry has invested £1 million. “Increasing the use of the material available from each hide is a good way to decarbonise,” Logan Duran says. He points out that it is difficult to predict what might happen to the market cost of materials in the future, but suggests that if manufacturers everywhere are chasing a share of low-impact materials, these will be at a premium. Getting as close as possible to using the full hide makes perfect sense, he argues.

The founder of specialist consultancy Spin 360, Federico Brugnoli, observes that many of the circularity initiatives that Tapestry has developed so far have already opened up new business models for the group. This shows, Mr Brugnoli insists, that circularity being good for business “is not just theory any more”. In Tapestry’s case, Logan Duran says developing the business case for the (Re)Loved programme coincided with the covid-19 pandemic. Customers were unable to bring products into stores for repair and the team of craftspeople in the specialist workshop the group runs in New Jersey had time to turn their attention to products that had accumulated on the shelves of their storeroom. A small collection of inaugural (Re)Loved products came from that exercise and Tapestry has not looked back since.
World Leather intends to cover Tapestry’s circularity initiatives in greater detail in the course of 2025.

Coach’s Heart bag is made from leather sourced from regenerative agriculture projects.
Credit: Tapestry

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