Notes from the tannery

Crosshatched collagen gives salmon leather several times the tensile strength of cowhide at equal thickness. The honest comparison, thickness caveat included.

Shoe leather in Iceland, salmon-skin robes among the Ainu, the 'fish-skin Tatars' of the Amur. Fish leather isn't a novelty — it's a tradition industrial cattle briefly interrupted.

Chrome tanning takes a day; ours takes five to eight weeks. What the skin is doing in the vats all that time, and why there is no shortcut that doesn't ruin it.

In 1786 a brigantine full of Russia leather sank off Plymouth. In 1973 divers brought the hides up — still supple, still scented. The story our whole method rests on.