The Natural Difference

A Better Way


Using Skills

Customer photos of our natural sheepskins bringing joy & comfort in real life

Real Sheep vs. the Average Sheepskin Rug

Hand prints from the wall of a tannery where chromium salts (blue-green powder) tan raw hides into an initial “wet blue” state

Except from the movie Erin Brockovich with a quick Hollywood explanation of Chromium 3 & Chromium 6

Our 4 Tanning Ingredients: Salt, Water, Bark, and Citric Acid

Zach & Nora, one of our regenerative farm partners at Shady Creek

Chromium 6 remains present
in many finished leather products.

Only 1 in 2,000 hides will be traditionally veg tanned, the rest will be discarded or chrome tanned

This video may be triggering and shows a tanning district of Bangladesh, one of the world’s worst case scenarios in regards to pollution in leather tanning.

Nobody really knows where sheepskins come from or how they get made or even if they have anything to do with a real sheep, and much less anything to do with the land and community around them.

The disconnect between the average person and this particular product is vast and I come face to face with it every time someone sees my sheepskins and asks, “was that a real sheep?”
(which is a very, very common reaction)

A “real” sheepskin from “a real sheep” is probably one of the best ways to describe what I make. Our sheepskins look more like something you would see in a field than something you would take off a shelf and if you look closely you can probably still find a few remnants of grass hiding in the wool tufts.

That’s because they weren’t processed by being soaked in sulfuric acid to burn off the chaff, and they weren’t sent off to a third world country like 90% of the world’s hide tanning, where the toxic and heavily damaging industrial tanning process could be accomplished out of sight and out of mind.

I wanted to find a better way to draw the beauty and the value out of sheepskins. One where you can still see the real nature of it and you don’t irreversibly destroy the health of local soil, air, water and workers in exchange for a chemically clean and shiny sheepskin.

So I started searching for different ways of tanning and learning how to tan using simpler materials like salt, water, soap, and the natural tannins in tree bark. It takes significantly more time and skill to use natural tanning methods but it’s well worth it and here’s just a few of the benefits:

No. 1: There are absolutely zero traces of chromium 3 or 6, bleach, sulfuric acid, formaldehyde in our sheepskins. Various residues of these industrial tanning ingredients are found in most sheepskins and can cause allergic reactions and damage skin, lungs, and internal organs. The leftover traces of benign chromium 3 can transform into carcinogenic chromium 6 with exposure to heat, sunlight, or oxygen.

No. 2: Lanolin, the natural oil sheep secrete, remains on our sheepskins. Lanolin nourishes human skin, moisturizes it, protects it from bacteria, and helps it heal from things like eczema. It’s also known to have a calming effect on babies and animals. This is stripped off during the chrome tanning process and though many companies promote the goodness of lanolin, they fail to mention that their sheepskins are completely devoid of it. The chemical process also weakens the wool, leaving it feeling dryer and more brittle.

No. 3: It’s sustainable. Tree bark is the main ingredient in our veg tanning process making it a renewable resource that can be harvested from branches and logs. It has a high tannin content so it can be reused many many times. The veg tanning process has been used sustainably for millennia by just about every people and tribe, from Vikings to Mongolians to Native Americans, while chrome tanning has only been around since the 1850s with devastating results albeit highly efficient ones.

No. 4: Quality. Bark tanning creates a much more durable leather. Veg tanned goods can literally last centuries, while chrome tanned leather typically starts to break down after a few years.

No. 5: Natural look and feel. Our simple process allows the hides to retain their authentic textures, colors, and sizes making each one unique and perfectly imperfect. Natural variations are calming to the eye and personally, we just prefer them to look like the real thing. Most sheepskins you will find in stores are chemically bleached and/or dyed then cut and shaved for uniformity.

No. 6: Traceability & Partnership. We love getting to connect people to farms and farms to people. These aren’t synthetic mass produced rugs made by machine and static materials, they were living animals that had to be raised and nurtured by people and by the land. Commercial sheepskins are almost untraceable, with little to no information about where they were tanned or even a country of origin. We partner with local farms and shepherds all of whom care deeply about the land they live on and the animals they raise. We want people to be able to know and have peace of mind about where they actually come from, and how they’re made, all the way down to the literal ground level. That way when you purchase a sheepskin, you become part of the beneficial cycle that goes right back to the soil.

The Industry Standard Way

Chrome Tanning

Here’s a few facts to start with:
99.5% of hides in America are wasted.
That’s only 1 in 200 being used.

Out of that 5%, most (90%) are then industrially tanned using chromium salts (a volatile & toxic heavy metal that can quickly become carcinogenic).

Quick aside: What is chromium? Chromium is what the overwhelming majority of the leather industry uses to tan leather and hides. It’s applied as a salt in a form called Chromium 3 which is officially considered benign. That is, unless you’re exposed to it daily, or it’s inhaled, or touched, which essentially means it’s unsafe for just about every tannery worker.

This is just the beginning though because Chromium 3 transforms into its even more dangerous form, Chromium 6, simply by being untreated, or being exposed to oxygen, heat, sunlight, and friction. Chromium 6 is a tried and true carcinogen, famously featured in the blockbuster movie, Erin Brockovich. Besides all kinds of cancers it can also burn skin, cause respiratory issues, damage the blood, kidneys, lungs, and heart, not to mention this damage can actually be passed down to the next generation at a DNA level.

Un-fun fact: the majority of the world’s tanneries are located in countries where they are unregulated, because either there are no legal regulations or no real enforcement of them. The spent chromium is often dumped into local waterways, solidified and sold as animal feed along with the leather scraps, or simply left to accumulate in the ground. Either through the ground water table or through flowing downstream, the chromium can then spread to soil, crops, animals, and drinking water, making them both infertile and toxic.

The tannery industry is a huge player in Bangladesh, with chrome tanned goods ranking as the third largest earning export. Tanneries in Dhaka release a combined 22,000 tons of untreated liquid waste per day into local rivers. These waters have become “unusable” and “toxic” since the tanneries arrived, literally turning the rivers black. Farmers, who make up 75% of the people in the riverbank, can no longer use the river water for irrigation. 25% of the chickens in Bangladesh were found to have harmful levels of Chromium 6.


After 20 dormant years, a chrome leather tannery in India was still giving off chemicals. The work site contained 165,000 tons of chromium and other chemicals, and it spread to areas 1.5 miles away from the plant.

10 years after closing the Wolverine tannery in Rockford, Michigan, a 25 mile radius of soil and water were found to be contaminated with PFAS and chromium 3 resulting in blue soil being dug up and ground water no longer being drinkable.

When German regulators tested finished leather products for chromium 6 between 2000 and 2006, “chromium (VI) was detected in more than half of 850 samples” & in 2011, a small scale Danish study found that almost half of imported leather shoes and sandals contained chromium VI.

That leaves only 1 in 2,000 hides (0.05%) to be tanned using the more traditional vegetable tanning, which takes natural ingredients such as leaves and tree bark along with artisan skills to create what’s considered a higher quality finished product and sustainable process.

However, even this small number is actually misleading because much of this tiny fraction of leather is actually “combination tanned” meaning it’s chemically treated with chromium and then the veg tan is added as a finish to get the higher quality look and patina.

If veg tanning is so great why aren’t more people doing it?

The veg tanning process means spending more time, and more effort, to produce way FEWER hides. To give you a proper perspective on the massive difference in efficiency, a single smaller hide takes an average of 2 weeks to veg tan by allowing bark to naturally penetrate and fully transform the hide, not to mention a few hours of hands-on physical and skilled work. A chemical tannery can employ industrial machinery and chromium salts to tan thousands of larger hides from start to finish in one. single. day. and can employ unskilled workers to do it at a fraction of the price.

While industrial chrome tanning seems like it’s a cheaper and more efficient option, we actually believe it comes at a much much higher cost, which is why we choose to do things in a different and more natural way.

Our goal in highlighting some of the harsh realities of the tanning industry is not to scare people into buying our sheepskins, and it’s not to paint some kind of David and Goliath story. We’re a highly local artisan craft operation (aka teeny tiny) and we’re not trying to compete with the global market of industrially tanned sheepskins or shame anyone who has them, because to be fair, it’s almost impossible to find anything else on the market.

We simply want people to know and be able to trust that we do things differently, naturally, and that is why we want to highlight what these differences actually are. Our goal is to work alongside farms and shepherds to steward the resources around us well, by creating the best quality sheepskins we can, including the quality of the process.

Further Reading & References