A footwear company from Denmark believes that using leather that consumers can trace back to the farms that reared the cattle that supplied the hides strengthens its brand and enhances its sustainability story. This level of traceability connects its products more clearly to the natural world.

Traceability is the name Danish footwear brand Roccamore has chosen for a new capsule collection it brought to market in late January. The collection’s heeled ankle-boots in beige, blue and black are the first products to use traceable leather from Spoor, another Danish company.

Spoor, spun off from wet-blue and wet-white producer Scan-Hide, launched in September 2020. Its aim is to convince customers to support an idea it developed inhouse, a laser-technology based system for marking and identifying hides. A year before launch, Scan-Hide chief executive, Michael Sondergaard, spoke about the technology at a workshop on traceability that leather industry organisations COTANCE and UNIC arranged at Lineapelle in Milan. Mr Sondergaard said the system would be able to provide access to the whole life-story of the animal a hide had come from, from farm to finished product. He insisted this would add value to products because today’s consumers are keen to know as much as possible about what they are buying.

The idea revolves around using laser technology to mark fresh hides with a sequence of characters. Through accurate supply chain management, these characters can link to the information contained in an animal’s ear-tag about where it was born and how many times it moved farms before going to the abattoir. These laser markings survive tanning processes so that the code that denotes the hide’s origin is still present in the finished leather. With careful control of what happens after tanning, including shipping the leather to finished product factories and, eventually, cutting it into pieces for, in this case, a particular shoe pattern, the system makes it possible for brands to connect all the upstream supply chain data to every style of shoe or boot, every sofa or every bag they sell.

Fashion connection

When Mr Sondergaard presented this idea to Birgitte Holgaard Langer she signed up to lend her in-depth expertise of innovation in fashion and retail to the project. Ms Langer was the chief operating officer and chief marketing officer of Lego Wear, a children’s clothing brand run under licence from the toy company by fashion group Kabooki. Another achievement at Kabooki was establishing a childrenswear partnership with high-end automotive group Lamborghini, creating Automobili Lamborghini Kidswear. She has also worked for Vero Moda, part of the Bestseller fashion group. “We met,” Ms Langer explains, “and Michael explained what Scan-Hide had developed, showing me this completely unique system for laser-printing an individual code onto each hide it sends out. The connection to the data on the ear-tag on each animal gives proof and a guarantee that we can provide, not just premium leather, but also security and transparency about the raw material and how it has been processed. I said it was amazing. I started as a consultant, but I realised that my real wish was to stay with this mission and bring the idea to life.” As a result, since its launch in September, she has been the business development director of the Spoor division of Scan-Hide, heading up this new brand for the group.

She wasted no time in talking to her contacts in the fashion industry about the ways in which the new technology might help them add value to their products and brands. “There is no lack of great stories in fashion and lifestyle,” she says. “What Spoor makes possible is to present stories that are grounded in data.”

The first person to see the potential of this was Frederikke Antonie Schmidt, the shoe designer who founded Roccamore. She is a graduate of the Polimoda school in Florence and worked for a number of high-end brands before returning home to Denmark to set up on her own. She uses her ties to Tuscany to source shoes and boots from artisan manufacturers there. She is now using her ties to Spoor to incorporate traceable leather into her latest capsule collection. She can show that the hides originate in Scandinavia, are made into wet blue by Scan-Hide, are then shipped to Germany for retanning and finishing and sent from there to the artisan shoe factories in Italy that make her products.

Spoor’s laser identification system provides all the back-up data Ms Schmidt requires to prove all of this, to guarantee that the cattle from which the hides came were well treated by Scandinavian farmers. Roccamore has taken that upstream supply chain information and made it available to consumers by means of a quick-response (QR) code printed on the inside of the upper of each of the boots in its Spoor-Traceability range.

Five freedoms

Scanning this code with a smartphone is enough to give consumers the assurance that the leather in the shoes and boots in the collection is from animals that lived in keeping with the so-called ‘five freedoms’ for livestock. These commitments seek to make sure the animals have been protected from pain, disease, discomfort, hunger and thirst, and have been allowed to carry out behaviour that is in keeping with creatures of their own kind. “Frederikke saw that she could use this extra traceability to strengthen her brand,” Ms  Langer explains. “She had already had meeting after meeting with suppliers about this. Some offered a little of the traceability she was looking for but she was not satisfied; they could not offer the depth required for what she defines as true traceability.”

Spoor can provide that depth. After years of working in the meat industry, Michael Sondergaard brought a high level of knowledge of the livestock supply chain to this project. If they want to, supermarket chains can use the data they have in their systems to inform customers about the farm an individual, small joint of meat comes from. The information is there. In a similar way, Spoor’s customers, including Roccamore, will, if they want to, be able to launch future capsule collections that use leather from only Danish hides, or, drilling down even further, only hides from the special landscape of southern Jutland. Again, the information will be available.

The only future

Roccamore founder, Frederikke Antonie Schmidt says she is very happy with the way the original project has gone so far, giving her confidence that traceable leather was a good step for her to take, following previous capsule collections that highlighted biode­gradable leather, water-saving leather and naturally tanned leather. She says that she thought long and hard about bringing “yet another fashion business, a high-heeled shoe brand” into the world before she launched Roccamore. But she decided to go ahead with the launch because she saw the scope for building a brand in a better way.

Working with Spoor is another part of this. “It’s important,” she says, “because it ensures animal welfare. With the 100% traceable concept from Spoor, we have 100% certainty that the animals really have had a good life. This project is very important to me and I’m proud of how well it has turned out. We’ve had overwhelming interest from our customers and from people in general. Everybody is positive about the possibilities that we have launched with this concept. I am convinced that total transparency is the only future the fashion world has. The concept of 100% traceability is an important step in that direction.” Roccamore intends to bring out three new Spoor collections in the course of this year. One is in the pipeline for the end of April and others are planned for September and October.

The company has made a financial contribution towards a biodiversity project at a farm near Vejle from every sale it has made of products in the Spoor-Traceability collection. The farmer involved in the project, Michael Kjerkegaard, wants to return parcels of land on his farm to the way they were 500 years ago to enhance the quality of the soil and encourage flowers, insects, birds and wildlife to flourish there. “Cows are smart,” Roccamore has observed. “They eat grass but avoid most flowers, unlike goats, who love eating flowers, causing all the insects, plants and small animals, who need the flowers to survive, to disappear.”

Pioneer trail

Ms Schmidt has been a pioneer for a long time. Roccamore shoes have a special insole that she developed herself, working with an orthopaedic shoemaker. This insole allows wearers of the brand’s heeled footwear to walk with their feet in a more natural anatomical position than high heels often allow. Tests have shown that, as a result, Roccamore products promise 19% less pressure in the heel area of the foot, 44% more arch support and 26% less forefoot pressure.

In addition, she has, in the words of Ms Langer, “always looked at the industry from a sustainable point of view”. She does not over-produce to avoid waste; like Spoor-Traceability, all Roccamore products are limited-edition. She does not work with wholesalers, but sells her collections in her own stores in Copenhagen, Aarhus and Lyngby and through her own online shop. “She has created her own space and is doing things the way she wants to do them,” the Spoor business development director says. “Roccamore is a small start-up, but I have to tell you: Frederikke is a powerhouse.”

To prove the point, she explains that the government of Denmark has already recognised Ms Schmidt’s talent and the force of her personality. In August last year, the minister of economic and business affairs, Simon Kollerup, announced a new export promotions forum to help Danish companies rebuild their export activity following the first wave of the covid-19 pandemic. The new forum consists of eight “restart teams”, each one dedicated to a specific area of the export economy and the wider business community. Mr Kollerup said he wanted to create “the best conditions for Danish export companies to remain strong in the global market”. One of the eight teams is devoted to fashion and textiles; the minister appointed Frederikke Antonie Schmidt as its chairperson.

To believe or to know

Lots of brands go to great lengths to show that they are sourcing their raw materials and their finished products carefully, that they avoid cutting any corners on matters of fair treatment of workers or environmental responsibility. And for many, making statements to this effect is enough. But this wasn’t enough for Roccamore; it wanted to remove any doubt in consumers’ minds and to show the full story behind its material selection for the new capsule collection. It was determined to prove that it had put deep thought into the origins of the leather it was using. “It’s one thing to believe something,” Ms Langer says, “and it’s another thing to know. Frederikke wanted people to know and we were able to help her deliver that.”

The Spoor director’s insistence is that higher levels of traceability can help the wider leather industry claim its rightful place in the circular economy of the future and she says other brands will begin using the laser-based technology in the course of 2021. “It’s through transparency that people will see clearly that leather is a by-product of the meat and dairy industries. I believe deeply that this can make a difference. Roccamore is definitely seeing already that connecting its products to nature is increasing the trust that customers have in the brand.”

As is often the case when pioneers push forward, Roccamore’s launch of a collection made from traceable leather involved a leap of faith. But it wasn’t alone; Spoor insisted that the two companies would take this leap together, hand in hand.

The QR code on the inside of the upper unlocks access to the entire back-story of the leather, proving that the provenance of the hides is farms that look after their animals well.
Credit: Roccamore

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