We use only vegetable tanned leather, for both women’s sandals and men’s ones. For us this might be enough to explain the characteristic of our sandals compared to many others that are on the market, but let’s try to deepen a little to explain the reason for our choice and then let’s go into more detail.
At the moment it is the method with the lowest environmental impact in use for tanning leather. Since today it is easy to hear about “low environmental impact”, we explain why we can say it.
First of all, the leather used is processing waste from the food industry, therefore by-products that come from Italian or European slaughterhouses. Leather tanning is able to transform a waste product into a precious, long-lasting, beautiful, repairable, versatile material, but vegetable tanning compared to chromium tanning is not limited to this and still does something more.
This type of tanning is carried out with natural tannins and over time. Vegetable tanning takes much longer than for example chrome tanning, which occurs with the use of chemicals, even if, compared to the past and especially in Italy, significant improvements have been made in terms of environmental impact.
For vegetable tanning, on the other hand, essences obtained from the bark of Chestnut, Quebracho, Mimosa are mainly used, which give color, smell, resistance and versatility unique to the leather to the point that, over time and with use, it will change hue and shine taking on the characteristics of a product that has lived with you.
This could already be enough to make it a unique material, but in addition to the environmental, “visual” and use aspect, there are other very important ones deriving from natural tannins and are the rebalancing of the bacterial load, breathability and therefore portability even for those have contact allergies to chromium or contact dermatitis. In fact, the tannin molecules bind to the fibers of the leather or vegetable tanned leather through hydrogen bridges, which remain stable within the material, giving it absorbent properties that maintain their effectiveness over time.
These are some of the reasons that led us to use them for our products, (they are part of us and of our daily life, 98% of the sole and vegetable leather is produced in the Tuscan tanning district) and to choose them again every day…
