Olivenleder

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.

08/09/2026

„Polyester“ is the worst insult Gen Z has right now. That’s good news!
The best the leather industry has had in a long time.

For those who haven’t caught up yet: young people use „polyester“ online to call something fake or unreal. Something that wants to look expensive but is made cheaply. A „polyester lifestyle“ means a life that only exists for the likes, all staged. Façade, nothing behind it.

That gives me hope right now. Real hope.
When it comes to leather too.

Because in the end, the young ones have the last word, literally.
They get what’s going on. They look closely.

We can talk, stall, dress things up and dodge responsibility all we want. But the ones coming after us are the ones who decide in the end. And they can tell very quickly what’s real and what’s fake, what has substance and what only looks good on the surface.

So we’re better off facing our responsibility now, not once it’s too late and we’re left picking up the pieces at great cost.

Next week I’ll be at Lineapelle.
And that’s where I meet the people who see it the same way I do.

Looking forward to seeing you there!

11/08/2026

Of course I filmed this before eleven. In Italy that matters 😉🇮🇹

As always, I’m looking forward to new encounters and good conversations over a cappuccino at Lineapelle. After eleven we’ll find something else, obviously!

Slots in the bio. ☕️

20/07/2026

Collar or harness?
Either way, she likes to wear hers in leather.

And she’d be mortally offended if she knew I used photo number two.

Lucy, our Vizsla-Labrador mix, is 10 months old now, deep in her teenage phase. She’s already eaten half a dog toy and needed emergency surgery for it, but that’s how it goes with family members. It’s never boring.

One thing is certain: she always looks good doing it.
And we can’t imagine life without her anymore.

🖤

14/07/2026

Treat yourself to something made of leather.
Then lean in and smell it. Honestly, good for the soul.

10/07/2026

Blue and green, side by side. 🟦 🟩
Two hides at exactly the same point in their life.

Freshly tanned, still wet, waiting on the rails for the next process step.

🟦 The blue-grey ones on the left are wet-blue. That colour isn’t dye. It’s the chrome tanning agent reacting with the hide, so the skin comes out of the drum looking bluish.

🟩 The beige-green ones next to them are wet-green, tanned with an extract of olive tree pruning, and that tint comes from the leaves and the wood of the pruned branches.

Neither colour lasts unless wanted. Both can be dyed into almost anything later on, so at this stage the colour only tells you what went into the drum to tan the hide.

Both processes use a similar amount of water, time and energy.
What differs is what happens to the water afterwards.

🟩 A modern tannery or a vegetable tannery with a biological wastewater treatment plant ends up at zero net water consumption. It can take the water from the river, clean it, use it, clean it again and send it back to the river. It only borrows the water for a while.

🟦 Chrome tanning is extremely efficient, and a modern chemical wastewater plant handles it well. But some chrome washes out during the various process steps, and there is always some chromium left in the water. It gets captured and pressed into a filter cake, and that filter cake has to go somewhere. Typically disposed as special waste. Modern chrome tanneries can also clean their wastewater to the point that they can release it back to the river.

What I find most telling is seeing blue and green lying next to each other at all. Keeping both worlds apart without cross-contamination takes a modern setup, care by the tannery workers, and it means the present and the future can work alongside each other in the same building.

🎥

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.

Adresse

Pfullingen

Telefon

+49712116230

Webseite

http://www.olivenleder.de/

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