Felicity Cooney is an Australian designer who makes shoes and bags from kangaroo leather. Her business is sustainability focused; using solar panels to power the office; recycled paper to print on; recycled cardboard for packagaing; and, the tannery that she works with recylces 40% of the water that they use.
Cooney talks to Imogen Bailey about the production of kangaroo leather and why she uses it for her products.
So from grass-roots, there's [something] like 30 million kangaroos in Australia and the Australian government controls their population because they're not farmed or anything, they're just free in the wild. Their birth rate and their survival rate has just been going up exponentially.
So it doesn't get to a point where they eat out all of their wild habitat, the government does the kangaroo cull so that they have a sustainable population. So from that kangaroo cull, only the four most prevalent breeds get culled. So it's not like a rare kangaroo and there's no endangered problems.
Kangaroos are an interesting animal because – like I said – they're not farmed and they're also part of the marsupial family as opposed to a bovine cow, sheep or goat, which are all very methane heavy producing things, and marsupials aren't. So they're a much more carbon friendly source of leather.
So from the kangaroo cull, the meat is harvested from the kangaroos. So that's one level of by-product and the second level of by-product is the skin which would just get thrown away if it wasn't used. So from my perspective, that's a sustainable use of materials because if something is going to get thrown away, it may as well be turned into a product.
I use a tannery that is on the north-side of Brisbane called Packer Leather and they've been a tannery for 130 years or something. But it was important for me to use an Australian tannery because I know that Australia has strict standards about how chemicals are used, how things are processed and how workers are treated.
The processing is all done on-site in Narangba so when I go and visit the factory I get to see all the processes that go in behind it and I'm comfortable – they recycle 40% of the water that's used in the processing and they manage any chemicals that are used – so it's not like in China where the river goes blue and purple and green, it's a very managed process and I'm comfortable that they're doing the best that they can environmentally.
Then from my perspective as a designer, kangaroo leather is a superior product, one: because of sustainability, and two: because it's actually a superior product for shoes and bags.
It's a weird thing but apparently kangaroos have way more collagen than other animals, and it's in the top layers of their skin, so all the fibres are in one sort-of meshy direction, whereas for other animals its higgledy-piggledy. But that's why sometimes you'll get a really random weak point in a bag or a leather jacket, where it'll just come apart, whereas that never really happens with kangaroo leather.
So because of the collagen, they make really soft and supple shoes and a lot of football boots are made out of kangaroo leather which I didn't realise. I think a lot of people would be surprised that Nike and Adidas make their football boots out of kangaroo leather.
But there's also so many different [uses for the leather]. Whenever I talk to Packer they're like, 'oh, that leather we developed for using on helicopter seats as lining.'
They make one for boxing bags and one for motorcycle jackets, because [the leather is] light [and] tough. I think kangaroo leather is three times stronger than any other leather of the same weight.
One of my designs is a summer bag that is a string bag in the kangaroo leather and it's a design that wouldn't work in any other leather because each little strand needs to be very strong, and whenever customers come up and touch it and play with it and they're like, 'will this break?' and I've never had one break. I've put kilos and kilos of stuff in it and it's just totally amazing as a product.
[Another] important part for me is that they have the marsupial foot –which sounds really strange – but a lot of cattle and sheep because of their hooves really damage the Australian environment and plants. But because kangaroos are a native species and they have that paw versus the hoof, it's better in every level. It's a real product that we should be promoting more, because of the sustainability and the impact on the land – which is so much less than cow leather.
Another reason why I love kangaroo leather [is] because it is a much stronger, much better leather. What I would say from my experience with cow leather, is that there's definitely 30% of the cow leather that can't be used because they have the hide which naturally has places that are too thick to use and certain places that are too thin to use. The kangaroo leather is very even throughout, it may be like 2% of the very edge that can't be used, but it's so little compared to cow leather.
[In terms of sustainable fashion businesses] it's much easier to grow a small sustainable company than it is to make a big company sustainable. So I think that's something really worth fighting for. It may be a slower path, but I think it's a better path.
I think the fashion industry needs to keep talking about it, even if the consumers aren't exactly ready to listen yet.
This article has been edited for clarity and brevity.