The rivers come first
Every skin we tan began in a wild river on Québec's Côte-Nord, on a fish caught for food by local hands. This page is about where the material comes from — and what we owe the place.
Some of the last great salmon rivers
North of the St. Lawrence, the boreal shield tips its rivers into the sea — cold, tannin-dark water running through forest that has never been cleared. The Moisie. The Godbout. The Mingan and the rivers beyond. Wild Atlantic salmon still return to them every summer, as they have since the ice left.
Atlantic salmon are under pressure across their whole range. The runs here are among the healthiest left anywhere, and they are watched closely — counted, managed, argued over, protected by people whose families have fished them for generations.
This is where we live and where we work. The tannery exists because of these rivers, and it will only ever be as good as they are.
No fish is taken for its skin
Our skins are byproducts of the existing local fishery. The fish were caught for food — by anglers, by local processors — and their skins were headed for the waste bin before they came to us. We add no demand for salmon. We take what the table leaves.
That is a hard constraint, and we like it that way. Supply is limited by what the fishery lawfully lands in a season, which means production is limited too. A few hundred skins a year, not a few hundred thousand. The number on each skin is honest.
Each skin is logged on arrival: which river its fish came from, in which season, from whose hands. That record follows the skin through the vats and onto its permanent page in the archive.
We add no demand for salmon. We take what the table leaves — and we keep the river's name on it.
A share of every sale goes back
A fixed share of every sale is returned to salmon habitat restoration and river conservation work on the Côte-Nord. Not a gesture — an operating cost, budgeted like bark and salt.
We also keep the pressure of the work itself low. Bark tannage produces no chrome effluent. The volumes are small. The bark is gathered from the same forest the rivers run through, and the fleshings and trimmings go to compost, not landfill.
If the day comes when the rivers can't spare their fish, there will be no leather. We accept that. It is the only honest way to make something from a wild animal.
The method those skins deserve, in full.
Read the process