At one time, in the area around Brisbane, there were dozens of tanneries. Packer Leather, the only one still tanning, has survived through determination and its ability to move with the times, from sheepskin in its early days to its position now as one of the few tanneries in the world that can meet sports and outdoor footwear brands’ demands for kangaroo leather.

Kangaroo leather is in demand for its tensile strength and lightweight properties, and there is a highly sustainable raw material supply, for reasons that will become clear. However, few tanneries around the world specialise in producing the material.

One that does is Packer Leather, a family-run tanning company based in Narangba, about 40 kilometres north of Australia’s third-largest city, Brisbane. Its roots are in wool and sheepskin. Its original location, from its foundation in 1891, was at Chermside, nearer the city but the company moved north to its current location in the 1970s when expansion of the metropolitan area brought residential communities a little too close for comfort. Joint-managing director, Lindsay Packer started in the family business in 1960 and trained first as a wool-classer. But the wool side of the business began to dwindle during that decade owing to a collapse in the price of the yarn. Even tougher challenges were just around the corner. By the end of the 1960s, his father had died and Lindsay Packer took up leadership of the business, quickly making the decision to move to the new premises and focus on producing leather, with a first move into kangaroo leather as part of the new plan. He is still a hands-on member of the tanning team and, waving his fingers in the air, says: “This is how I think; I have to be doing something. You can’t run a tannery from a chair; you have to be in the middle of it.” So he shaves and trims hides most days.

Tug-of-war

It was some time before operations of any kind could begin at Narangba as the site was subject to a planning tug-of-war between two competing local authorities, a dispute that went all the way to court. Another early set-back was a ban on exports of kangaroo leather in the mid-1970s. Mr Packer recalls vividly having to take a series of short-term steps such as carrying out contract work for tanners in Europe. “All I wanted was to keep the doors open,” he says. By the end of the 1970s, he was more optimistic about Packer Leather’s prospects and travelled to Europe for the first of many visits, to attend the old Paris-based leather fair in 1978, tagging on visits to a number of tanneries at the same time. “I was like a child in a toy-shop,” he says of that trip and describes the experience of thinking, from a European perspective, about what was happening back home as “like looking back at Australia from the other end of a big tunnel and that being at the Australian end of the tunnel was like looking at everything uphill”.

In Australia at that time, the shoe manufacturing industry was already beginning to go off shore, many tanneries were being run by accountants and their owners quickly lost the will to carry on, he recalls. “So I was able to hire some of their people and buy some of their equipment at a good price. I had begun to see the possibilities. You have to have a dream and believe that you can make it a reality. Then you have to be determined and work at it relentlessly. Also, you have to listen to and follow good advice when people offer it, but then you and only you can make the decision and own the outcome, whether good or bad.” There were bigger tanneries than his in Brisbane at that time; he believes Packer Leather may have been about number seven then, just in the area around Brisbane. “I think there were tanners here with huge possibilities,” he says now, “but they gave up, sometimes at five-to-midnight, just as things were about to change for the better. Maybe we had the dreams, the vision, the faith to go in another direction.”

Remote location

There have been difficult times too: Mr Packer describes the impact on the business of the global financial crisis that began in 2008 as “hell”, and then there is the ongoing challenge of being in such a remote location in relation to most of the rest of the leather industry. With no one to turn to easily for help, he says the company has had to become quite self-sufficient, developing a deep understanding, for example, of how tanning machinery works. This knowledge has been very valuable: there is tanning machinery on the site that Lindsay Packer installed himself. When the machinery manufacturer’s technician made it to Brisbane, he only had to carry out a check that everything was in order. At the same time, he describes Packer Leather’s technical director, Andrew Luke, as “world class, easily among the best seven or eight people in the world at doing what he does”. Nevertheless, he acknowledges the importance, even in the age of mobile phones and the internet, of face-to-face contact.

He is convinced that the best way to build up trust is for supplier and tanner to work together as closely as possible. He wants a long-lasting association with his suppliers. Yes, he wants a good price for the chemicals and technology he buys, but what matters most is that it should work well, not least because Australia is too far to bring material that will not work. There are still some things he would like to see. “I think there is still too much handling,” he says. “I would like to see what’s possible with robotics; this is something I haven’t seen people try.”

Choice of materials

In spite of Packer Leather’s roots in the sheep business, these skins now account for only 5% of output in 2014, with bovine taking up a 25% share. This leaves 70% of capacity to devote to kangaroo. The tannery processes 15,000 kangaroo skins per week, 300 or 400 sides of bovine leather and 450-500 sheepskins. All of the raw material is Australian. Queensland has a high kangaroo population because the habitat and climate suit them. Nationally, the animal’s numbers are around 50 million. Rainfall levels have been relatively high throughout this decade and, with good water supply, the kangaroo population levels has climbed to levels that, the authorities believe, require control to avoid threats to crops.

Lindsay Packer is aware of sensitivities around this, but says: “Scientifically, there has never been anything put in front of us to suggest one bit of downside in terms of conservation with regard to kangaroo. We make our decisions based on the scientific data, not on politics. The biggest factor on population levels is the weather, but we know that if we build our industry based on long-term averages, we know we will still have a business 50 years down the road. It’s a question of not letting greed take over. It means you could fall back to 50% and still survive if you had to.” This matters a great deal to him because, while he and his brother Graham (sales and marketing director of Packer Leather) represent the fourth generation of Packers to be involved in the business, his son, David, and his daughter Susan, working as joint managing director and customer service manager, respectively, are both part of the senior management team now too.

David Packer explains that four Australian states (Queensland, New South Wales, South Australia and Western Australia) are currently running macropod management programmes, which guarantee the long-term sustainabilty of this natural resource. Gamey, lean, healthy kangaroo meat is in demand for human consumption and the skins are, as with other types of meat, a by-product. He says relationships with skin suppliers are good and that a rather complicated supply chain involving harvesters, sometimes in very remote parts of this enormous country, placing carcasses in special cold storage boxes for meat companies to pick them up and process, works effectively. The company says it has “a very effective” supply chain for raw and pickled material. “It’s a strong, long-term relationship,” David Packer says. “It has to be: a partner like this has to have similar beliefs and ethics to ours.”

Kangaroos can be large animals but they have a rather strange shape and, as wild animals, often subject themselves to damage from barbed wire or insect bites. As a result each skin yields only between four and eight square-feet of finished leather. “It’s a niche market,” Graham Packer says. “It’s too expensive just to be a competitor to bovine leather, but it has advantages. It’s lightweight and its tensile strength is very high; there’s a natural cross-weave in the fibre. You cannot take bovine leather down to the same substance, around 0.3 or even 0.25 millimetres for some customers, and keep the strength there. It seems to me that a lot of footwear manufacturers still don’t understand that.”

Understanding customers

Some customers do understand the benefits of kangaroo. Packer Leather’s primary customers are multinational athletic footwear brands for products such as football, rugby and baseball boots. Other applications include technical gloving, other types of footwear and (although for bovine rather than kangaroo leather) sports balls (mostly cricket and the astounding version of football called Australian Rules). High-performance footwear accounts for 53% of total output at the moment, sales and marketing manager, Mark Hourigan, explains. Sports balls and gloving are in equal-second place with a 14% share of the total. Recreational and outdoor footwear, including several brands of western-style boots, consume 5.4% of Packer Leather output at the moment, and dress footwear 5.1%. Vegetable-tanned leathers and a few other specialist products account for the rest. The company runs an interesting Facebook page celebrating some of these specialisms: they reflect a current trend towards the artisan, the small-scale handicraft production of bracelets, bags, home decorations and so on. Social media is helping to spread the word and many of these new-generation artisans are frequent visitors to the tannery’s onsite shop to pick up material. “These people also talk to each other,” Mr Hourigan says, “and word about the attributes of kangaroo leather has spread that way, too, among these accessory makers, as well as among bookbinders, falconry enthusiasts and even people who mend organs (they use leather in the bellows). It also helps that we have a low minimum order, 200 square-metres in a single colour.”

It’s the highly technical kangaroo leather that attracts most attention for Packer Leather in export markets, but, Graham Packer points out, the athletic footwear sector has suffered owing to the readiness of many big-name brands to switch to synthetic uppers, even for the boots their elite sports stars wear. “Our turnover from this segment has come down by as much as 40% in the last two or three years,” he says. “It used to account for something like 90% of the market for our leather, but not any more. That said, there has been an upswing just recently and there are brands that are talking about doubling their use of kangaroo leather.” He relates the reaction of one brand to seeing how uncomfortable a tennis shoe appeared to be on one of its high-profile sponsored athletes. With super-slow-motion camera shots at top tournaments to check for foot-faults, the brand was able to see and study how unyielding a synthetic upper was against a tennis athlete’s moving foot. And after carrying out research, it is increasingly opting for kangaroo leather uppers instead.

Lessons from wool

This strengthens Graham Packer’s conviction that there is a keen need for the leather industry as a whole to promote leather as a material. “The world has tried to make leather a commodity, but it’s not a commodity,” Mr Packer says. “But its value as a raw material needs to be made clearer. There is an absolute dearth of consumer education on this and there is a real need for it. Plastics manufacturers are attacking leather more than at any other time in my lifetime and if everyone in the leather industry keeps running around in circles doing their own thing, we’ll never get anywhere. And that is happening in the leather industry because we lack leadership. There is a real contrast with the wool industry, which has the Woolmark.” This is a reference to the famous skein of wool brand mark that is now owned by Australian Wool Innovation, which licenses clothing companies to pay an annual fee to put the logo on their products as an independent quality endorsement, an assurance that the product conforms to a specific set of standards.

The Packer company spreads its community support quite widely, ranging from donating boots and balls to local sports clubs to being a founding sponsor of a medieval festival. “The emphasis is very much on the word ‘local’,” says Mark Hourigan. There is also a programme through which it helps to fund pastoral support for high-school students, as well as a less formal form of support called Red Frogs. Red Frogs are support volunteers who provide hands-on help during Schoolies Week, when high-spirited high-school graduates in Australia celebrate the end of their exams by taking a week-long holiday with their friends.

In 2012, the teenage daughter of one employee needed a kidney transplant and tests showed her father, the tannery employee, was compatible. The company’s entire workforce took up the cause, not only encouraging their co-worker in the build-up to the operation, but raising money to help him support his family through such a difficult time. They raised thousands of dollars from staff, which the company quadrupled. Both family members are doing well. Everyone remembers the rush to help with pride and fondness. David Packer says it shows that there is more to being part of what Packer Leather is trying to do than just turning up for work.

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