Industry pioneer Tom Schneider has died
Founder and executive chairman of leather manufacturing group ISA TanTec, Thomas Schneider, has died. The company has announced that he died in his country of birth, Germany, on January 18 from complications following a car accident. He was 70 years old.
Tom Schneider completed the leather manufacturing course at the famous Lederinstitut Geberschule in Reutlingen in the early 1980s. His work in the industry soon took him away from Germany, with a spell in tanneries in Australia before a move to China in 1988.
He described himself as a serial entrepreneur and, by 1993, he was ready to launch his own leather manufacturing company, ISA TanTec. In the course of the next 30 years, he grew ISA TanTec into a group with five production plants: one in China, two in Vietnam, one in the US and one in Italy.
As early as 2004, he recognised that it was imperative to reduce the consumption of energy, water and chemicals in leather manufacturing so as to reduce the environmental impact of leather. He used the name LITE (low impact on the environment) to describe the collections that ISA Tan Tec brought to market.
His pioneering attitude came to the fore again in 2020 when he decided to start making a new range of 100% bio-based materials, launching a new division called Creation Of Sustainable Materials (COSM).
At the time, he told World Leather: “We are not saying that this is an alternative to leather. No. Absolutely not. I don’t want to have an alternative to leather. I want to have an alternative to plastic, the vegan materials, the polyurethane stuff. It’s not replacing leather. It’s not our target to cannibalise our product but to offer customers additional products, ones that have a good story behind them and are available from a supplier that brands have worked with for 20 years already.”
