Second traceable shoe success for Spoor
Hide supplier Spoor has successfully completed a second fully traceable leather project with a footwear brand in its home country, Denmark.
At the start of 2021, Spoor announced a partnership with footwear brand Roccamore, which used leather tanned from traceable Spoor hides in a collection called Traceability.
Now Pyk Copenhagen, a brand that specialises in handmade children’s shoes, has followed suit and is using leather from Spoor hides in a collection of six styles called, simply, Spoor x Pyk Copenhagen.
Spoor is a spin-off from wet blue and wet-white producer Scan-Hide. Scan-Hide has developed a laser-technology based system for marking and identifying hides and, in the autumn of 2020, launched Spoor to bring to market traceable leather resulting from this. The technology makes it possible for consumers to know the full back story of the leather in the products they are buying, including the country of origin, the breed and the birthplace of the individual animal the material came from.
Pyk Copenhagen’s finished leather and shoe manufacturing partners are in Portugal. For this project, the brand had no difficulty in bringing on board Curtumes Aveneda, a leather manufacturer based just outside the footwear manufacturing hub of São João da Madeira, 35 kilometres south of the city of Porto.
As part of the project, Curtumes Aveneda is finishing semi-processed Spoor hides, keeping careful track of the origin of the finished article and passing on all the data, along with the finished leather, to Pyk Copenhagen’s suppliers of shoes. This means that when the footwear arrives back in Denmark, full traceability remains in place.
The shoe brand has described this as extending the guarantee of responsible production that it seeks to give. Through its partnership with Spoor, this guarantee now goes “all the way from farm to shoes”.
Founders Jessica Polland and Ulrik Schultz have explained that they also wanted to make a collection with the strongest possible connection to Denmark. “We know that all animals grew up under Danish Animal Welfare legislation,” the said, “and that the hides were tanned under strict Danish social compliance at Denmark’s last remaining tannery, Scan-Hide.
Knowing the exact information to individual hide level guarantees the traceability of every single pair of our shoes.”
Image: Pyk Copenhagen.
