Bayer’s second ‘Trend Articles and Fashion’ book is almost complete. The leather experts at Bayer Chemicals AG, Leverkusen, are not waiting to be overtaken by the latest trends – they are setting their own! This year they have already developed two leather trend books to show tanneries which types of leather are going to be ‘en vogue’ in the coming season.
In May this year, a four-strong team headed by Bianca Verstegen of the Marketing Department in Bayer Chemicals’ Leather Business Unit started work on the ‘Trend Articles and Fashion’ project. The first trend book, for the Spring/Summer 2004 fashion season, was issued in July and the second, for Fall/Winter 2004/2005, will be completed shortly. The impressive work weighs several kilos and contains about 20 samples of trendy leathers specially produced for this purpose in Italy. ‘Leather is something you have to be able to feel’, explains Verstegen. ‘That’s why we have included a sample of each of the leathers in the book.’
The trend book enables tanneries to produce the leathers for the next season in advance. ‘This gives our customers in the tanning industry a real advantage over their competitors, as they are then in a position to meet the huge demand from the leather processing industry, which wants the finished leather as quickly as possible for further processing’, says Verstegen. ‘We also include the corresponding formulation for each sample in the book, thereby demonstrating our expertise in the field of fashionable leather.’
The project was launched in response to the repeated request from customers for insider tips from Italy as a centre of the fashion industry. ‘This gave us the idea of getting together with an Italian stylist to develop joint collections’, says Verstegen. ‘And we were lucky to find someone who knows the scene, someone who works for major fashion houses such as Gucci and Louis Vuitton and therefore knows what the new trends are going to be.’
For each edition of the trend book, the project team – Verstegen plus two other people from Leverkusen and an Italian applications technologist – defined three or four major trends with which particular objects or feelings are associated. In the latest edition, for example, it is Wild Sporting Life, Tuscany Farmer Style and Future Sensitive. Then came the tricky task of translating these often diffuse concepts into real leather products whose touch and colour were appropriate to these themes or conjured up the right associations. The leathers themselves were produced – with constant input from the entire project team, including the stylist – in the tanning centre of Santa Croce in Italy, where Bayer has a competence centre with a laboratory and applications development department. Here the coarse raw hides were transformed within just a few weeks into fashionable leathers that were finally compiled into the trend book in Leverkusen. The books have already become an important customer support tool for the company’s regional applications technologists.
