From Hide to Heritage: Sourcing Our Leather

The journey of an ILHAN piece begins not in our Shoreditch atelier, but in the tanneries of Tuscany and the tanneries of Yorkshire, where raw hides are transformed through processes that have remained fundamentally unchanged for centuries.

We source exclusively from tanneries certified by the Leather Working Group — an independent organisation that audits environmental compliance, traceability, and worker welfare. But certification alone is not enough. Twice a year, our founder visits each tannery personally, walking the floors, inspecting hides, and sitting with master tanners to understand what the season's leather will offer.

For our jackets, we select full-grain calf from Tuscan tanneries that vegetable-tan using oak and chestnut bark — a process that takes up to forty days but produces leather with a depth of colour and a capacity for patina that chrome tanning cannot match. For our shearling collars, we work with a Yorkshire tannery that specialises in merino shearling with consistent pile density and natural ivory tones.

Every hide that enters our atelier is inspected individually. We reject approximately thirty percent of the leather delivered to us — not because it is flawed, but because it does not meet the specific requirements of the piece it was intended for. A hide perfect for a card holder may be entirely wrong for a shearling aviator. This selectivity is costly, but it is the foundation upon which everything else is built.

When you purchase an ILHAN piece, you are not simply buying leather goods. You are inheriting a chain of decisions — from the pasture to the tannery to the cutting table — each made with a long view of quality, sustainability, and the belief that the finest materials deserve the finest hands.