After falls in the volume and value of leather that Italian tanners produced in 2024, the president of national industry body UNIC, Fabrizio Nuti, has offered his colleagues reasons for sticking with their long-term vision. 

The president of UNIC, Italy’s national tanning industry association, Fabrizio Nuti, has told member companies that patience and long-sightedness are the characteristics that will help them overcome current challenges. Fortunately, these are qualities tanners have in abundance, he insists.

Fabrizio Nuti has been president of UNIC since the end of 2020. Based in Santa Croce sull’Arno in Tuscany, he runs the business founded by his father, Ivo Nuti, in 1955. It now comprises the Nuti Ivo, Lloyd, Everest, Papete and Deluxe tanneries in Italy and also has partnerships in Paraguay, Morocco and Hong Kong. In 2023, luxury group LVMH became the majority shareholder of the Nuti Ivo Group.

His comments come at a time when UNIC has reported revenues of €4.1 billion for Italy’s leather manufacturers in 2024. This is a fall of 4.5% compared to the previous year. The value of exports was €2.8 billion, down by 3.6% year on year. In terms of volume, they produced 95.4 million square-metres of finished leather, and 6.7 million tonnes of soling leather, figures that mean falls of 4.1% and 6.3% respectively compared to 2023.

The number of businesses in the Italian leather sector is down, too, falling by 5.7% year on year to reach 1,074, and the total number of people these businesses employ has also fallen, coming down by 3.6% to reach 17,230.

Ahead of the times

“I don’t need to explain to you the importance of taking a long-term view,” Fabrizio Nuti told his colleagues at the UNIC 2025 general assembly in Milan in July. “Tanners in Italy have always been able to stay ahead of the times, anticipating changes in the market and investing when and where we needed to. We haven’t found a magic formula because there is no magic formula. We have instead taken a long-term view and not allowed it to be altered by emotion or by difficult situations.”

When it comes to difficult situations, though, he accepts that the current picture is particularly challenging and is putting the patience and staying power of Italy’s leather-industry entrepreneurs severely to the test. “Uncertainty reigns supreme,” he says, “and we are having to cope with a severe economic crisis that has been going on for far too long now.”

Sources of encouragement

It is only natural, in times of crisis to look to the past, he says, pointing out that this can be an important source of encouragement. He is proud of a project in which UNIC had intensive involvement: the restoration of an ancient tannery at the archaeological site of Pompeii, in southern Italy’s Campania region. Excavation of the site unearthed 15 cylindrical tanks that tanners used for the turning hides and skins into leather. These tanks had been buried under four metres of pumice and ash since the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD.

The restoration project reached a successful conclusion in 2023 and the successors of those first-century leather makers have just published a book about it, with ‘The Tannery of Pompeii’ as the title. “We wanted to reiterate that this industry is a part of history, part of the tradition of Italy,” the president insists. “This helps explain how we became, and remain, undisputed world leaders in making leather.”

Mr Nuti says the book is already making its way all around the world; UNIC has sent copies to customers, to people in the industry, to Italian embassies and cultural institutions in different countries. The book has also gone on show at Expo 2025 in Osaka. He pays tribute to a predecessor as president of UNIC, Gianni Russo, saying it was Mr Russo’s vision that brought about the organisation’s involvement in the project. The current UNIC president continues: “Gianni Russo had the foresight to understand how important it was for us, as part of our efforts to promote the industry, to honour what he called ‘these most ancient roots of our profession’.”

On receiving his copy, fashion designer Brunello Cuccinelli sent a note of thanks to UNIC, saying he viewed the book as “a testimony to the value of beauty, of memory and of dialogue between business and culture”. 

Regulation frustration

But dialogue becomes difficult in times of trouble. In all, Fabrizio Nuti puts the number of conflicts currently under way in different parts of the world at 60. He points to political and economic changes that are affecting the two biggest economies in the world, China and the US, with serious repercussions for all of their trading partners around the world. Last in his list of major challenges is what he calls Europe’s “regulatory bulimia”. He calculates that around 1,000 European Union regulations have brought concerns to the industry in the last five years, with more on the way.

Of these, the one he speaks of with greatest disdain is Regulation 2023/1115, better known as the European Union Deforestation Regulation (EUDR). The UNIC president says he has been working on EUDR since November 2021 and that, for four years, the regulation has absorbed “almost all my energy”. He told his colleagues in Milan that he had done this in the knowledge that, as the regulation stands, unless leather can be excluded from its scope at the eleventh hour or, at least, the bureaucratic burden EUDR imposes can be reduced, “it will have a devastating effect on our industry”.

Large companies will have to comply with EUDR from December 31 this year. Small and medium companies will face the same burden from the end of June, 2026. It will impose strict traceability obligations on companies in the European Union that use products from seven commodity groups. The EU says its aim is to make sure there is no link to deforestation from consumption in the EU of materials from the seven commodity groups. These include bovine leather and hides.

In response, Mr Nuti makes it clear that leather manufacturers support actions to combat deforestation, to protect the environment, and the health and safety of workers and communities. On EUDR specifically, he says he has written numerous letters, met with many members of the European Parliament from a wide variety of political parties, and sat down with European Commission officials, technical experts and lobby groups. UNIC has engaged specialist law firms to advise on EUDR. It has organised 18 seminars on this subject and sent more than 50 communications to member companies. Liaising closely with Italy’s wood industry, and “with a significant financial commitment”,  UNIC has worked with an IT provider to prepare a platform to help member companies meet the requirements of EUDR.

It is planning to unveil and demonstrate the new platform at the Lineapelle exhibition in Milan in September. After this, there will be a pilot phase of use, with modifications still possible. UNIC insists the platform will be ready for use by the end of 2025.

Scope for hope 

One recent meeting with a politician gave Fabrizio Nuti hope. He travelled to Rome in mid-June to present UNIC’s case on EUDR to Antonio Tajani, deputy prime minister of Italy. Mr Tajani is also a former president of the European Parliament and former European Commissioner for industry and entrepreneurship. “He understood the gravity of the situation,” the UNIC president says, “and took immediate action. That same day he wrote to the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, and to the European Commissioner for trade and economic security, Maroš Šefcovic to make sure the Italian position on EUDR was being heard. This was something we desperately needed.”

He says he still does not know if this meeting and Mr Tajani’s reaction will be enough to change the fate of EUDR. “We’ll see,” he concludes. “But at least we now know that the Italian government has taken a clear and unambiguous position on it.”

Best option for brands

For customers that are working hard to lower their environmental impact while continuing to be successful, the UNIC president says the best option they have is not to invest in less material (because, otherwise, how will they grow their businesses?), nor to invest in synthetic alternatives to leather. “We have seen some brands moving towards fossil-based synthetic materials,” Mr Nuti says. “And if you rely on poor data, you can make this look like a better environmental option than using leather. Some of the international data sets that our customers work with present synthetics as being 10 or even 15 times better, in terms of environmental impact, than leather. This is because they allocate a large share of the whole-life impact of an animal to the hide, plus an economic allocation that is based on a value that is more than three times higher than current market rates.”

The fact remains that almost all of the animal’s environmental footprint should rest with the determining products, in this case milk and meat. Leather is a non-determining by-product, Fabrizio Nuti insists, with an economic value of around 1.5% of the total value of the animal. Demand for hides and leather has no influence on the numbers of animals farmers raise. To argue otherwise is to present what he calls “an absurd and unfair position”. He adds: “We will continue to work to dismantle this position. This will help us convince customers that, instead of buying less leather or moving towards synthetic alternatives, what they ought to do is invest in better leather.

Demand for leather has no influence on the numbers of animals farmers raise. To argue otherwise is to present what Fabrizio Nuti calls “an absurd and unfair position”.
Credit: Lineapelle

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