Olivenleder

Name: Olivenleder
Address: Pfullingen, DE
Telephone: +49712116230

Eine Revolution! Olivenleder ist gut für Mensch und Umwelt. Jede Art von Leder. Vollständig biologisch abbaubar. Ziemlich sehr gut.

Ein pflanzlicher Gerbstoff, gänzlich frei von Schadstoffen, für die Herstellung von wunderschönem, gesundem Leder.

18/06/2026

A favourite bag. Obviously...

I’m on my way back from Florence, where I got to be there for the debut of Paul Andrew x Cuoio di Toscana at Pitti Uomo. The room, the people, the shoes, for anyone who loves leather it was pure pleasure.

And then this, right next to me. I quietly took a photo because I couldn’t quite believe it. If you leave aside the personal connection the owner has with the bag, what’s left is a bag that is falling into tiny pieces right in front of me. Made of plastic that is now turning into microplastic, ending up in our water, in the air, in our bodies.

Fake is anything that pretends to be something else
just to be something at all.

This bag was designed to look like leather, produced as cheaply as possible, and it could only ever exist because it pretended to be something it wasn’t.

Real things are becoming rare. And I believe this real is becoming our highest value. It takes people with rare skills to make the material. It takes getting your hands dirty. It takes designers with a creative spark that can’t be generated artificially to shape a true icon. That is how value is created. And all of it can only come from honesty in every single step of the process.

Real value grows out of the connection between people and the things they make, of that I’m convinced. It’s the same with people. A friendship doesn’t last without real appreciation for the person in front of you, and a thing doesn’t last without real care in how it’s made.

The bag next to me was probably quite pretty once.
Now it’s becoming a burden for all of us.

14/06/2026

That’s a freshly tanned roe deer skin in my hands.

It came out of a project we did at home with our godchild, who needed something special for school. We tanned it ourselves, with our tanning agent made from olive leaves, the same one I work with every day. It was a lot of fun. And I think it says a lot about the school that they encourage projects like this. It had more to do with real life than a good deal of what otherwise gets taught.

I’m taking this as a moment to say thank you. I’m glad about all the interest in my work and in this material. For everyone who recently joined, here’s a short version of why I bother writing here on Instagram from time to time.

I was born in 1981 and live with my family in southern Germany. Coming from a family of tanners, I studied leather processing and footwear technology in Pirmasens. From there my path led through Eagle Ottawa, an MBA in General Management at Steinbeis University, then Mercedes-AMG and Bader, and finally to Olivenleder.

For ten years now I’ve been trying to explain to brands and tanners what this one tanning agent can do. Not just for their product. For a better leather industry, and for better acceptance of leather among the people who end up wearing it, driving on it, or sitting on it.

Thank you for all the kind feedback and the interest.
Have a good Sunday, everyone.

13/05/2026

My son took a piece of leather to school this morning.
His teacher has a moth problem.

Richard is 10. Yesterday his teacher mentioned moths in her closet.

This morning he grabbed a piece of chestnut-tanned leather from our shelf and said he’ll need it today.

The leather came from Eugenia Presot, who runs Conceria Presot in Porcia – family tannery since 1932. When she gave us the scraps, she said: „Put a piece in your closet. Keeps the moths away. We’ve always done it.“

Richard remembered.

He wanted to tell his class:
The leather was tanned with chestnut extract. The tannin comes from the wood. And no, nobody cuts down forests for it. Chestnut trees are coppiced. You cut them back, and they grow back stronger.

Those tannins are hard for insects to digest. A natural defence against fungi, bacteria, and insects. And when you tan leather with it, those properties stay in the material. No chemicals, just tannins.

Bet you didn’t know that either?
You’re welcome.

Richard’s Little Leather School.

09/05/2026

Four weeks ago I posted about a piece of leather Mike brought me from Amsterdam.

Now it’s a pair of boots.

Made by Herr Geiger – a family workshop in Frittlingen that has been making shoes by hand since 1900. The wall behind him tells you what he does. Postcards from customers who hiked thousands of kilometers in his shoes and wrote back to thank him. One sent a wooden disc with a pilgrim shell – „2500 km ohne Blasen.“ Another a photo from somewhere far.

This is what I keep coming back to: leather lasts long enough to build relationships around it. Plastic doesn’t generate postcards.

The boots are made from Jesse – Olivenleder, milled, veg-tanned, no chrome. Herr Geiger worked with the leather like he’s worked with leather for decades. No drama, no special instructions. It just behaved like good leather should.

First time I put them on, I expected the usual break-in stiffness from new hiking boots. There wasn’t any. I’ve worn a lot of hiking boots over the years. These are different. Like the leather was already on my side.

Walking them in slowly. The terrain comes later.

06/05/2026

Leather is loud. Plastic is terrifyingly quiet.

An animal raised for food feels brutal, even when it’s honest.
Plastic pollution feels accidental, even when it’s devastating.

We banned plastic straws. But we still wear plastic jackets.
Make it make sense.

Here’s what gets lost in the emotion: animals are raised for food – not for leather. The hide is a low-value by-product. 134 million hides are wasted globally every year (LHCA, 2024) – buried or burned. That’s 40% of all cattle hides that never become leather.

Plastic feels different. Its damage is real but it happens elsewhere. Later. Far from where we make our choices. Microplastics accumulate quietly – in water, in soil, in us. We call it unintentional.

This isn’t about emotion versus reason.
It’s about proximity.

Leather makes consequences visible.
Plastic lets them drift away in space and time.

So maybe the real question isn’t why leather makes people uneasy.
Maybe it’s why so many of us have learned to look away from plastic.

09/04/2026

This is Jesse.

Not a person – a leather. Olivenleder®️ Jesse. Milled. Soft. Full Vegtan leather, tanned with olive tree pruning extract.

When Mike from showed me the milled version, I couldn’t stop touching it. That grain, that texture – it’s the kind of leather that makes you want to build a bag around it. Or a pair of shoes. Something that deserves to be seen and used every day.

Milling breaks the fibres just enough to give the leather a beautiful natural tumbled grain. Soft but with structure. Relaxed but not floppy. The kind of hand feel that makes people ask: what is this?

And the answer is simple: a byproduct hide, tanned with a byproduct from the olive harvest. No chrome. No heavy metals. No synthetic chemistry. Just plants meeting leather.

Mike runs from Amsterdam – 160+ years of family experience in the leather trade. The kind of guy who picks up a hide and tells you its life story. If you’re looking for clean, premium vegtan leather for your next project – he’s your man.

🫒 Olivenleder®️ – proudly natural by Silvateam

03/04/2026

An Earth Award for replacing a natural, biodegradable material with petroleum-based plastic? I’d love to understand the logic.

I’ve been sitting with this for a few days. I don’t want to take anything away from someone’s success, and I don’t want this to come across as envy.

But when TIME Magazine posts a video on LinkedIn showing cattle while claiming that animals are killed for handbags, and then celebrates Stella McCartney’s Earth Award on Instagram to over 12 million followers, where she states that „billions of animals are slaughtered in the name of luxury, for handbags and shoes and jackets“ and that „toxic chemicals used in leather tanning seep into rivers and into human bodies,“ I can’t stay quiet.

No cow, sheep, or goat on this planet is killed for a handbag. That’s more than 99% of all animals used for leather. They are killed for meat. The hide is a byproduct. If it isn’t turned into leather, it becomes waste, rotting in landfills and creating even bigger environmental problems.

She’s not entirely wrong about the chemicals. Parts of this industry have real problems. But this same industry has developed solutions that don’t cause these problems. Not as a marketing move, but because millions of hides need to be processed responsibly. That pressure forced innovation: Metal-free tanning, plant-based tanning agents, closed-loop water systems. These exist today.

And has anyone looked at what goes into making polyester? Petroleum extraction, antimony trioxide as a catalyst, ethylene glycol, microplastic shedding with every wash. None of that seeps into rivers and the sea?

Her online shop. A handbag. £1,695. Main material: 100% polyester. That’s plastic. Luxury plastic, but plastic.

I respect the vision. I respect the search for alternatives. But as long as the actual products on the shelf are made of plastic at luxury prices while natural, biodegradable materials are being vilified on a stage in front of the world, something is deeply off.

Adresse

Pfullingen

Telefon

+49712116230

Webseite

http://www.olivenleder.de/

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