Curtidos Badia,
a success story at ACCIÓ’s strategic change conference at IESE

Today at IESE Business School, Curtidos Badia, a promoter and founding member of Leather Cluster Barcelona, was presented as a success story of ACCIÓ’s 9th Conference on strategic change in clusters.

During the session, three cases of Catalan companies from different sectors were presented that have managed to transform themselves in order to remain competitive in a global framework as changeable as today’s.

This conference, which forms part of the cluster policy of the Generalitat de Catalunya, aims to build up knowledge about winning business models in the various clusters and to position the Catalan cluster model, and the companies that make it up, within the training circuit of top international business schools. It is likewise an excellent working tool, as it provides a general understanding of the challenges and, above all, of the opportunities that companies face.

Xavier Badia, CEO of Curtidos Badia, began his contribution by recalling the origins of this family business founded by his great-grandfather in 1889 and highlighting the first major strategic change he faced, in 1997, when at just twenty-three years old he took charge of the company. Badia was then turning over 4 million euros and was focused on the footwear sector almost exclusively for the domestic market. Xavier Badia made a clear commitment to quality, diversification and exports and, under his leadership and thanks to the great work of his team of colleagues, he has turned the family business into one of the leading leather suppliers for the leather goods of fashion and luxury houses, becoming a benchmark in innovation and sustainability, multiplying the company’s turnover to 50 million euros, doubling the number of direct jobs and devoting more than 90% of production to exports.

Badia continued his talk by championing leather as an example of the circular economy and sustainable fashion: “Hide is a waste product from the animals we eat. The leather industry recovers and recycles this waste from the food sector so that it can be reused as a new raw material. The tanning process gives animal hides a second life, upgrading a waste product to produce durable consumer goods with great longevity: a leather article can last a lifetime”.

Xavier Badia also emphasised the sector’s current challenges. Among them, he stressed the need to address the major communication challenge of reaching the general public, and consumers in particular, in order to question perceptions, often biased, resulting from the campaigns that activists and other sectors run against leather in defence of their own interests. He also stressed the need to keep taking steps towards full sustainable development and the global integration of the leather sector within the framework of the circular economy through innovation projects, such as valorising waste and organic resources to obtain high added-value products.

To conclude, Xavier Badia underlined the importance of being part of Leather Cluster Barcelona in order to tackle the present and future challenges of the leather industry: “unity of action among the companies and players of the leather sector is essential in order to face the future together; in this regard, the cluster is a driving and transformative agent for the development of new business opportunities through the competitive cooperation of the entire value chain”.

About Leather Cluster Barcelona

Leather Cluster Barcelona is an environment of competitive cooperation for promoting cross-cutting, transformative strategic projects with the aim of driving forward the ecosystem of the Catalan leather sector.

Committed to sustainable fashion, the circular economy and shared value, Leather Cluster Barcelona brings together 55 companies and players with an aggregate turnover of more than 550 million euros that employ some 1,800 workers, spanning everything from livestock farming and the food industry, tanneries, universities and research, through to chemistry, sustainability, design, leather manufacturing and fashion.