It is 40 years since Catalan small-skin tanning group Curtidos Codina recognised the importance of Brazil as a source of its main raw material and set up its own full-service tannery in the South American country. The facility, Cobrasil, is still going strong. 

The circularity of using an ever-present by-product of the agri-food sector should make leather a good industry for family businesses. Knowledge, skills, passion, business relationships and illustrious company names can pass from one generation to the next; the raw material will always be available, for as long as people include meat and dairy in their diets.

This is not to suggest that keeping a family business going is easy, as many in the global leather industry in 2025 will testify. The phenomenon of founding families finding themselves being bought out by bigger groups is real. Others are wrestling with unwillingness among younger family members to enter or stay in the industry and take their businesses forward. The demands of investing in new ideas and technology, in measures to meet ambitious regulatory initiatives, in campaigns to attract and keep customers, in training and retaining workers are all huge. Survival is hard, growth a pipe-dream for most.

And yet, every morning, in every corner of the world, dedicated people make decisions, draw up plans and work diligently to advance the leather manufacturing businesses that they have inherited from their parents or grandparents, or from generations beyond. In spite of everything, the doors remain open, the drums keep turning, the dreams live on. It is only right to mark important milestones when they come along.

Brazil celebration

This is something Jordi Codina was able to do in May  when his family’s company celebrated 40 years in Brazil. To be more precise, this was a celebration of 40 years since the opening of the tannery the group runs in Parnaíba in the north-eastern state of Piauí. In fact, its connections to Brazil go back to 1978 and the group itself, Curtidos Codina, began working at its original home in Vic, north of Barcelona, in 1941. The current chief executive’s grandfather, Joan Codina, set the group up and made it into one of the most prominent of the specialist small-skin tanneries that this part of Catalonia is famous for.

The company still specialises in making finished leather from small skins, especially for formal footwear. At first, it worked with Spanish entrefino lambskins, and, unlike most processors of this emblematic material, offered it to shoe manufacturers. This was (and still is) uncommon because the lambskins need special treatment at the retanning stage to make them suitable for shoes, and finding the right formula is tricky. In particular, though, the Codinas built up expertise in processing hair-on sheepskin and it was this specialism that brought the company to Brazil in the first place.

“We were buying dried skins from Brazil and shipping them to Vic,” Jordi Codina explains, “when the government in the South American country began to restrict the export of raw material. We didn’t want to lose access to Brazil because it was a key source of skins for us, so we moved some of our production there. We started renting space at a facility that Curtume Campelo owned in Juazeiro in Bahia. We made wet blue there and shipped it back to Europe for finishing. It was basic, but we didn’t require much structure or machinery. It was enough just  to have a few drums for soaking and liming, a couple of paddles, a fleshing machine, and so on. It worked well enough. In time, though, we saw the need to take this to the next level. We found an abandoned tannery in Parnaíba, rebuilt it more or less from scratch and moved our Brazilian operation there.” It calls the facility Curtume Cobrasil.

Sheepskin super power

Hair-on sheep thrive in the semi-arid conditions of Brazil’s north-east. These animals have evolved to withstand hot and dry conditions very well, which is why other good sources of this raw material include countries in West and East Africa. “You often find these sheep in places with a similar, tropical latitude to ours,” Mr Codina says, referring to Piauí’s position of a couple of degrees south of the equator. “And because the animals have adapted to the heat, it has an effect on the hair and on the skin, making this a special raw material. The grain is finer than on lambskin and the tear-strength is not as elastic. The leather is less spongy.”

The articles the Codina Group and its peers make from this raw material appeal to customers that he describes as mid-market, international footwear brands that make fashion-focused, dress footwear, including elegant, heeled and décolleté shoes for the women’s footwear market. Leather from the skins of hair-on sheep has, as its super power, the ability to withstand well the high levels of force required during the mounting process for this type of shoe. “The grain will not break,” Mr Codina explains, “even in a fine, pointed shoe, and this is a fantastic and very specific characteristic.”

Dramatic change

Appreciation of sheep leather has endured, even though the footwear supply chain has altered so much. The leather supply chain has evolved too, of course, going through what Jordi Codina calls “a dramatic change”. He explains: “When our group started, Vic had more than 30 tanneries. Now there are only a couple left, employing maybe ten people each. Many of us have had to make the decision to become international or move into another business sector.”
The Codina Group itself closed its tannery in the Catalan city in the first decade of this century. At one time, it also had production in Nigeria and became involved in a cooperative joint venture operation in China in the early 1990s, which was probably too soon, the current chief executive says now. It runs the Parnaíba tannery as a full-process operation, with a beamhouse and finishing plant there. The site employs around 150 people and processes 8,000 skins per day.
 It has a second finishing plant in Brazil, which it opened in Novo Hamburgo in 2009, to serve the footwear manufacturing community in Rio Grande do Sul. And in 2019, it re-established a presence in Europe, but chose to set up a finishing plant in Santa Maria da Feira, in northern Portugal, rather than return to Catalonia. The reasoning is the same: to be close to the factories in the region around Porto, which industry body Apiccaps says is home to more than 1,500 companies with an involvement in shoe production. There are also large footwear factories in the state of Ceará, close at hand for the finished leather that the Parnaíba site produces.

Close calls

Proximity where possible and efficiency in everything are concepts that Jordi Codina believes are central to the future of the leather industry. “Our efficiency leaves something to be desired,” he says. “Take a piece of leather measuring around 5 or 6 square-feet. How many times do we move it around, forwards, backwards, taking it from one machine to another in a different part of the tannery? Yes, the product is noble and beautiful and has so much charm, but our industry needs to become even more industrial.”

Beamhouses are a particular challenge; he believes the industry needs a relatively small number of beamhouses, but that these need to be big, should have excellent wastewater treatment plants and highly developed systems for managing solid waste, and should be located as close to sources of raw material as possible. These large beamhouses should serve as many finishing tanneries as possible and should work at full capacity so that the industry derives the maximum possible benefit, with the minimum possible waste, from the impact that wet-end processes inevitably have. 

In contrast, it is good for finishing plants to operate close to customers’ finished product factories, he continues, as happens in the case of those his own group runs. There is good scope, he is certain, for opening leather finishing plants anywhere footwear manufacturers operate, including Vietnam, Indonesia, Cambodia, India and Bangladesh. Rising costs in the Far East and all the recent tariff uncertainties could also make African countries a good prospect, if they have a high enough level of development and are open for business. These plants can be small, with low fixed costs, and still be effective and responsive to customers’ needs. Closeness means being able to respond faster and more easily to customer requests and to try out new ideas for them.

He explains that this is an important part of the Codina Group’s offering in Portugal now. Orders are smaller than they used to be, but the range of colours is wider than ever. Samples can be ready for customers to see in a short space of time; some customers visit twice a day to discuss the specific finishes or other aspects they have in mind for a particular product. “When I entered the business, good service meant delivering orders in 45 or even 60 days,” he says. “Now we are delivering in 10 days, and if possible, with small orders, it can be less. For some customers we are delivering in three, four or five days.”

The need for big thinking

All of this has helped drive innovation. Infrared spraying technology is one of the most recent additions to the set-up in Portugal. “This system doesn’t require a boiler and consumes little in the way of chemicals,” the chief executive explains, “and it uses very little water. A big tannery might consume 500 cubic-metres of water a day, but at Santa Maria da Feira we only need 3 cubic-metres per day.”

The Novo Hamburgo operation is different, concentrating on producing “a more commodity product” in terms of colours, with perhaps just small adjustments for shine or softness. This tannery, which employs 35 people, uses what Mr Codina calls “a universal crust” to do this. It achieves an output of 500,000 square-feet of finished leather per month, which he regards as “unbelievable productivity”.

He insists there is plenty to be positive about for an industry that was recycling, upcycling and making circular materials millennia before these terms were invented. But there is an impact from the upcycling work the leather industry carries out and he is an advocate for continuous improvement to make leather’s impact as small as possible.

This brings him back to the question of the leather industry not being industrial enough. Jordi Codina says he is fascinated by the mentality of Asian producers, especially those in China. “They are more productive and more ambitious,” he says. “They think bigger. They find solutions. They are doing amazing things in our field. Perhaps more and more of the leather industry will go there and stay there. A friend of mine went to China recently and said tanneries there were 20 years ahead of the rest of us. I said that even in 20 years we will not be where they are today. Perhaps we, in the rest of the industry, haven’t been willing enough to try automating and simplifying our processes. Perhaps we haven’t been brave enough.”

But, if this is true, the Codina Group is surely an exception. He doesn’t say this, but the group’s decision to remain committed to its specialism and its willingness to cross the Atlantic to be able to keep making its products are clear demonstrations of bravery. Achieving the milestone of 40 years of Cobrasil in Parnaíba was well worth celebrating.

Codina Group is celebrating 40 years since the opening of Cobrasil, a full-service tannery located in Parnaíba in north-east Brazil.
All Credits: Codina Group

Share this story: