WHY did we start this Sustainable leather project in Amsterdam?

It was 2010 in Buenos Aires Argentina!

There was a crisis in the Argentine government and WBI Leather as it was then called was a very succesfull and growing exporter of leather based raw materials to the European market and to some of the Tiger countries in Asian countries who with their cheap labour were still producing for the big brands who needed a stead and cheap flow of raw materials to sell to the strong branded shoe and leather goods companies.

From one day to another the newly elected President Madame Cristina Kirchner dicided to ban the exports of leather raw materials thus protecting local tanneries who were anyway shutting down due to corruptiuon and inflation during the time of her late husband Nestor Kirchner.

Since we were using some tanners to tan some part of our raw materials into either wetblue or crust unfinished leathers we decided to test our luck in the local market.

The first production lots became tanned as vegetable tanned leathers and we went around to different tourist oriented craft fairs and ask local craftspeople and leather artisans to test our vegetable tanned leather.

We were very surprised with the positive reaction to our proposed leathers mostly used for dyeing and tooling .

One of the first reactions we heard was besides the leather do you also have hardware or tools from Europe or the United States available.

Everyone heard of Tandy and complained that the local Tandy leather rep wsnt treating the customrs in a good helpfull way.

Curtidos David Rubin was then born!