What the king's deer taught me about lower-impact leather

The smell doesn’t hit you at first, but you know it’s coming. I’m on a farm, part of which has been converted into the first new tannery in the UK for a century. In the rural East Midlands, Jack Millington, a former marketer turned micro-tanner, is working on the hides of deer slaughtered at Windsor Great Park. The meat had always gone to the Windsor Farm Shop, but until Millington came along, the skins were being thrown away.

Millington has just shown me the unhairing of the hides, one of the most pungent parts of the process. After the hair is cut off, the skins slosh around a giant wooden barrel in a lime solution, releasing a sulphurous smell. “The tanning process starts off pretty gruesome and then it starts to become more like leather,” Millington says, as he opens the barrel to extract a sodden, jellyfish-like skin.

“It wasn’t the plan, that’s for sure,” Millington says of his career path. Growing up on his father’s farm, he was the son who wanted nothing to do with it. In his twenties he worked in creative agencies in London, discovering much later that he had an itch to do something more practical. One of the things that tipped him over the edge was a discovery about the skins of his father’s goats, which he was breeding to supply meat to Leicester's Indian population. “I naively was like, ‘Oh well, Dad’s got loads of different animals on the farm, most of which are going off into the food chain.’ So surely the hides and skins are being used for leather.” They weren’t. All the goatskins from his father’s herd were being burnt.”

That was the impetus for him and childhood friend Rory Harker to launch a Kickstarter in 2017 to start a tannery. The tannery still works with goatskins, but it has since expanded to deer skins from Balmoral, Windsor and the Knepp rewilding estate in West Sussex. He sells products including tote bags, glasses cases and journals made from the skin of deer that lived on that estate. One of Millington’s favourite stories is that Billy Tannery supplied the leather for the coin pouches the King handed out at last year’s Maundy Thursday Easter service, using skins from Windsor estate deer.

Billy Tannery makes about 10,000 square feet of leather a year, which is what an Italian tannery might produce in a week, in an industry worth over $500 billion globally. Britain once had 300 tanneries, but today fewer than two dozen remain, dominated by Scotland’s Scottish Leather Group.

Billy Tannery’s small scale and intimacy means Millington can keep an eye on almost every part of the process. “I’ve been to pretty much all of the places where we source the skins,” he says.

This supply chain is the opposite of how most of the world’s leather is made. In the global trade, hides can pass through many hands and travel thousands of miles before reaching a tannery, with each step often obscuring where the animal came from or how it was raised. It’s in that distance between origin and finished handbag that the industry’s biggest environmental and ethical problems take root.

An Earthsight investigation this year linked leather from brands including Coach, Fendi, Chloé, Hugo Boss, Chanel, Balenciaga, Saint Laurent and Gucci to illegal cattle ranching in Brazil’s Amazon. A Brazilian tannery in their supply chain was found to be sourcing from a meat packer accused of buying cattle from illegally deforested land. Many brands claim to ban Brazilian leather, but some rely on supplier assurances rather than verifiable traceability.

Waste is another problem. Perfection is prized in this business and brands can reject numerous hides for even minor blemishes, waste that rarely appears in glossy sustainability reports. At one Louis Vuitton plant in Texas, Reuters discovered that as much as 40 per cent of hides were discarded over workmanship issues.

Avoiding waste is a central part of Billy Tannery’s mission. His approach is to work with marks and scars rather than cut around them, seeing them as part of the material’s history. “Even without our own workshops, who we know really well, we ask, ‘Why did you cut around that?’ And they say, ‘Because it’s a mark.’ And we say we want you to use the whole thing. People are looking for defects.”

For Millington, the answer to leather’s problems lies in changing how it is sourced and used, not replacing it with materials that create different harms. Most “vegan leather” is plastic-based, fossil fuel-derived and sheds microplastics throughout its life. While sometimes marketed as cruelty-free, these materials are not biodegradable and many fall apart within a few years, persisting in landfill for centuries. Truly low-impact alternatives from mycelium to plant fibres remain niche, expensive and often reliant on synthetic binders.

Fixing leather’s reputation, Millington believes, starts with admitting that it’s a direct offshoot of the meat industry. “The leather industry has largely tried to distance itself from meat and food,” Millington says. “‘We’re a separate thing’ has been the argument. But I don’t think that washes anymore. Having grown up on a farm, I see this cycle. I’m OK with it.” The animals are being killed for food, so respect for the animals and their lives means that their skins should be used rather than discarded, he says. “There is a death involved. That’s the same as a burger that you eat in a restaurant. But as long as everything has been done in a way that is respectful to that animal, that to me is what you need to do.”

Seeing swollen hides steeping in vats and giant plastic tubs filled with hair is a long way from the smooth, fragrant leather goods in luxury boutiques. (That scent, incidentally, comes from added tannins and oils, not some natural musk.) For Millington, showing this reality isn’t about shock value but about making the connection between origin and outcome. In his view, fashion’s reluctance to confront these early stages is tied to its fixation on perfection. Flawless hides and uniform colour give nothing to remind the buyer of the animal that once wore it.

It’s a fixation Billy Tannery rejects. While luxury giants like LVMH, Kering and Tapestry own vertically integrated tanneries and chase uniformity, Millington embraces imperfections. He doubts that consumers care as much about supply chains and sustainability as some brands like to believe, but says honesty still matters. Show people the butchery or the tannery and many will recoil, yet he believes greater awareness leads to more informed choices, even if that means some opt out of leather altogether. It’s a mindset he thinks fashion could borrow from food, where origin and process are part of the sale.

“The fact that we can get food so cheaply now means we can go and splash our cash on a Gucci whatever. That probably needs rebalancing,” he says. “In some ways, we’re what a craft brewery is to Heineken. We’re trying to behave a bit more like a food and drink brand, because in some ways that industry is further ahead. Produce is labelled and where it comes from. But you don’t really get that from fashion items.”

Billy Tannery can’t fix a $500 billion industry on its own, but it offers a model of how leather could be made with lower impact, full traceability and with visible connections to agriculture. “Maybe some people won’t use leather anymore because of those reasons, but they are going to understand it, have a bit more respect for it, and can maybe choose a better option,” he says.

In the end, that’s what struck me most during my visit. The blubbery mass of an engorged deer skin, the pungent smell of sulphurous flesh, the nicks and scars that betray a life lived: I understand why all of that is absent from the polished displays on Bond Street. But here, in a small shed in the East Midlands, the gap between animal and leather accessory has been joined in my mind. I’ll never shop the same way for leather again.

Things to consider when buying leather

Ask about the origin: try and find out where the animal lived and how it was raised
Demand traceability: avoid brands that can’t or won’t verify their supply chain
Choose local: shorter supply chains generally mean better oversight
Buy less: quality leather lasts for decades
Avoid “vegan leather”: Most alternatives are plastic-based
Question perfection: it can lead to waste

Check out the full range of Billy tannery products here.