Animal hide is highly complex, protein-based, heterogeneous and extremely irregular in nature. The quality of the hide is determined by a number of factors that may have affected the animal during its life and that can result in some kind of imperfection or defect: parasites, scratches, scars, marks, and so on. Furthermore, during the leather tanning process, irregularities affecting the quality of the leather may also occur.

With the aim of providing the leather industry with knowledge in this field, Leather Cluster Barcelona has been working for many months to develop a comprehensive catalogue that can serve as a valuable tool for sector professionals in identifying the types of imperfections or defects that leather may present.

This project has received funding from ACCIÓ, the public agency for the competitiveness of Catalan companies attached to the Ministry of Business and Labour of the Generalitat de Catalunya, under the grants for competitiveness reinforcement initiatives for cluster facilitators.

The dictionary presented by Leather Cluster Barcelona contains a compilation of the main imperfections and defects identified in leather. Specifically, up to 24 different types of imperfection have been characterised.

The document includes the list of imperfections (name and key characteristics), their coding, a reference image of the hide associated with the defect (identifying the areas where the defect appears) and detailed examples of each one. Descriptively, each record comprises information on the area (identifying the main location where the defect is usually found), a remarks section with clarifications, explanations and details associated with the imperfection or defect, the difficulty of detection (a qualitative measure of how difficult it is for the specialist to detect the defect), the impact of the defect on production (indicating the severity of the defect on the finished product) and the frequency (an estimate of how often the defect is present: 1 in every 5 hides, 1 in 10, 1 in 50 or 1 in 100).

At this link you can download the full Leather Cluster Barcelona dictionary of natural leather imperfections.

Leather Cluster Barcelona is an environment of competitive cooperation for promoting cross-cutting and transformative strategic projects with the aim of driving forward the ecosystem of the Catalan leather sector. The cluster is an accredited body within the Catalonia Clusters programme and has the support of Acció.