Where things come from
Detailed work on traceability that Tapestry has been carrying out since 2019 could help companies in different parts of the supply chain respond to regulatory requirements, including EUDR.
Leathergoods and footwear group Tapestry is hoping to mark a key milestone in addressing deforestation in the leather value chain. It wants its efforts to establish a traceability approach to be of help to the entire sector and to contribute to industry standards. It believes its work may even help the leather industry resolve the challenges it faces in meeting the demands of the European Union Deforestation Regulation (EUDR).
The heated discussion about EUDR may have gone quiet since the authorities in the European Union agreed to delay its implementation by one year, but it has not gone away. The regulation will now come into force for large companies on December 30, this year, and for smaller companies, on June 30, 2026. European operators offering hides, skins, semi-finished and finished leather to customers (inside or outside the EU) are going to have to be able to show that their material has no link to land where recent deforestation has taken place. Tapestry, the parent group of Coach, Stuart Weitzman and Kate Spade, may be in a position to help.
“We think we have come up with a standardised approach for tracing cattle all the way through the supply chain,” says Earl Shank, senior manager for traceability at the group, “and for moving this information into finished products. We have been piloting this, using a draft standard and are now encouraging partners to come on board to help us refine the draft standard and build on it. We think there is enough here on traceability and on chain-of-custody for this to be an answer to EUDR.”
Original targets
Tapestry set key environmental responsibility targets in 2019, setting out where it wanted to be by 2025. Its original commitments included one to increase its sourcing of leather from tanneries with a gold or silver rating from multistakeholder body the Leather Working Group (LWG) from 63% of the total to 90%. Now, 97% of the tanneries it works with have a gold or silver rating, and more than 99% of its leather suppliers have been audited by LWG.It also said it wanted to reduce water consumption across the group by 10% between 2019 and 2025. “Traceability was part of this too,” vice-president for advanced technological development at the group, David Wright, recalls. “We had worked with research organisation BLC-Eurofins to set up mapping of our leather, as well as of fabric and hardware. We knew Brazil was going to be a hotspot for leather, so we decided to try mapping some of our product orders back to farms there.”
In just one month, this exercise flagged up connections to 54,000 farms and a total of 270,000 transactions. From this, the complexity of the problem was immediately obvious. It has taken years of work, but now a solution is in sight, with data at the heart of it.
In Mr Shank’s view, any solution that can help companies navigate EUDR or similar traceability hurdles has to take “an interoperable approach to data”. This means the data must be accessible across a wide range of platforms. He confirms that capturing data for farm-level information is especially important and confides that the way some sustainability certification programmes claim to include this information is inadequate. “I don’t think mapping is realistically applicable either,” he adds, “given our experiences.”
What the group has done is to use traceability and chain-of-custody tools from specialist platform TrusTrace to identify more accurate data and make it available for use throughout the supply chain.
Committee stage
At no point has Tapestry set out to plough a lone furrow on traceability. Its current commitments include involvement in a dedicated LWG chain-of-custody group, in a brand advisory traceability working group at non-profit Textile Exchange, and in a traceability best practice working group at industry representative body the American Apparel & Footwear Association. It has also been a participant in discussions on this topic that the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) has convened, and is joining a series of footwear and apparel traceability summits that Syracuse University and the University of Oregon begun hosting. It also supported a traceability initiative at The Fashion Pact, an organisation that luxury, fashion and textile companies set up in 2019 to try to protect climate, biodiversity and the oceans of the world.
“Tapestry is fully onboard with any solution from anyone that solves the leather industry’s challenges,” Earl Shank says. “There are a lot of initiatives out there trying to find solutions. We are fully aligned with the intention of finding an EUDR solution from any source. We will be happy to link up, share and hand over our learnings to support any industry standard approach.”
Technology-driven improvement
Earl Shank joined Tapestry in 2021. Two passages earlier in his career helped him prepare for the work he is doing now. Early on, he worked at Patagonia, the outdoor brand that began to talk about tracing the down in its jackets, for example, more than 10 years ago. He later moved to Washington DC to work for the Fair Labor Association, a non-profit organisation that gathers data on working conditions in factories around the world and campaigns to make them better.
In both of these jobs he worked on supply chain mapping and on environmental, social and corporate governance, exploring the role that technology can play in driving improvement. Fundamental to this, he says, is understanding where things come from and it is in this that he sees the greatest parallel with what Tapestry is trying to achieve today. He insists the accessory and footwear group was already “at the cutting edge” when it brought him on board to focus on this work.
It ends in tiers
Its traceability analysis is part of a strategy it calls ‘Tier Three Plus’. This is based on the idea of tracing the flow of its raw materials and products further upstream to tier three at least, but to go beyond tier three when there is a practical reason, such as deforestation, to justify doing so. As for any company working with large volumes of leather (it calculates that up to 55% of all its raw materials, by weight, come from the leather supply chain) this is not always straightforward.
Broadly, tier-one suppliers for Tapestry are the partners that operate finished-product factories, finished assembly or cut-and-sew operations. Tier two is its category for suppliers of finished raw materials. This includes tanners that provide finished leather, either from raw hides or semi-processed hides, as well as fabric mills or manufacturers of the hardware it uses in its bags. Tier three is for suppliers that carry out intermediate stages of processing, including tanners that take hides through wet-end processing. This leaves the ‘plus’ part of the strategy.
For hardware, tier four would be the point of extraction of the metal. For leather, it is less straightforward. Tier four can be the abattoir that makes the hide available, or it can go beyond that as far as the farm, or farms, involved in raising the animal the hide came from.
Help on the road
This brings us back to the particular challenges the leather value chain can present. Here, a demand for traceability back to farm level is likely to lead to questions about exactly which farm. Sometimes, it can be tricky even finding out how many farms are involved, owing to the number of times an animal can move in the months between birth and arrival at a feedlot or abattoir. But having glimpsed, during its first attempts at mapping, just how complex this can be, the group made a conscious decision to continue to address traceability and deforestation rather than walk away. “It was a question of staying and trying to help rather than pulling out and, perhaps, making the situation worse,” David Wright says.
Help came when philanthropic organisation the Tapestry Foundation launched in 2021, funded by an endowment of tens of $50 million. Its mission included supporting stewardship, sustainability and climate-change initiatives and it quickly put its money where its mouth was. In 2022, it announced a four-year grant of a reported $3 million to help World Wildlife Fund (WWF) develop systems to enhance traceability of the leather value chain in Brazil. This three-stranded project included elements aimed at restoring land that had been deforested, others aimed at improving empowerment of the communities whose lives have been affected by deforestation, and still others aimed, as we have seen, at developing a standard for deforestation-free leather. This is the multi-layered context from which the group’s traceability solution has now emerged.
“As this shows, Tapestry takes materials exceedingly seriously and has done for a long time,” David Wright says. “I know because I worked at leather manufacturers that supply the group before I came to work here. It has strong relationships with its suppliers, and it has people in its own teams who know all of the materials it uses really well. I remember being impressed, years ago, by buyers from Coach who had good suggestions for how the leather manufacturer I was working for could, for example, continue to supply summer-quality hides in winter.”
Widest possible use
When it published its most recent corporate sustainability report covering fiscal year 2024, the document included progress to date on tracing the whole range of materials it uses. The list includes synthetic textiles, cotton, manmade cellulosic fibres, hardware and, of course, leather. “We were sitting at 74% of material by weight mapped at that point,” Earl Shank explains. “The numbers do not suggest that traceability for leather is any more difficult than for the other materials, back to tier three and even to the abattoir. In fact, tanneries were the first group of partners that we invited to work with us on the TrusTrace platform. However, going further upstream and managing that data effectively is where the industry has to get to.”
Using the TrusTrace tools, the group had large volumes of supply chain data in its possession by the start of 2025. Its work to find out everything it can about where things come from continues, but it believes the time has come to put the data to the best and widest use possible.
Note: This is the second in a series of World Leather articles covering Tapestry’s circularity initiatives.
A cattle ranch in Brazil. Tapestry’s early attempts at tracing product orders back to the farm level flagged up immediately how complex the leather supply chain can be.
Credit: Tapestry
