What better day than the feast day of St Crispin to launch the new online Leather UK Directory?
The martyred St Crispin and St Crispinian are the patron saints of cobblers, tanners, curriers, glove makers, saddlers and leather workers, some of whom and more are displayed in the new Directory.
As identified in our five-year strategy in late 2016, Leather UK decided to extend its predominately tannery-only membership base to include the whole leather supply chain. In the past couple of years we have widened our membership categories to include Affiliate, Student and Reciprocal members, and as a consequence of operating in these new sectors of the leather industry we realised how little centralised information is out there.
What started out as an idea to limit this knowledge base to just our members has evolved into a full leather portal, with free access for all. With the objective of cataloguing people, organisations, events, training courses and other categories we have planned for the future, we built an online Directory with the intention that, in the fullness of time, it will become the go-to resource for the industry.
This is just the beginning. Now it's over to you, we know you're out there. We have populated the Directory with the first 100+ records, but this is a drop in the ocean compared to the many people who work with leather in this country. We had to start somewhere, so the Directory launched today is only our beginning point. Let's work together to add more data, more images, more categories, more information. The options are endless, but we need to know what you want.
We need you to add to it, share it and use it. In this age of collaboration, our ethos is that "if we build it, they will come". It's our field of dreams.
It's free. It's yours. Please use it.
