From greenqueen.com.hk
By Stephanie Downs
Stephanie Downs, co-founder and CEO of eco leather start-up Uncaged Innovations, reflects on how the plant-based milk labelling debate could be echoed in the materials industry.
When Oatly lost a recent Supreme Court battle over its use of the word ‘milk’, regulators framed the decision as a victory for consumer clarity. The term, they argued, is animal-specific and applying it to plant-based drinks risks confusing shoppers about what they are buying.
For innovators, however, the decision highlights a broader question: how language should adapt as new technologies reshape familiar products. Cars naturally evolved into electric cars. Phones became smartphones. Currency added cryptocurrency. Why do some industries evolve to accommodate the old and new while others fight innovation?
A similar dispute is now emerging in fashion. As biomaterials become credible competitors to animal hides, the question of what can legally be called ‘leather’ is becoming the new regulatory discussion.
The debate over terminology
The rise of alternative materials is not a niche phenomenon. Over the last decade, the leather industry has seen the birth of a number of successful alternative material companies innovating with natural ingredients like fungi, grains and agricultural waste. Analysts expect the production of bio-based leathers to grow by 37.4% CAGR from 2024-34.
In an attempt to slow this growth, terms such as ‘vegan leather’ and ‘plant-based leather’ are now banned in many European countries, one being Italy, which, alongside China and Brazil, is one of the biggest leather producers in the world. Here, companies using plant-based prefixes on their products now face the threat of heavy fines or even criminal prosecution.
Regulators argue that it is misleading to consumers for companies to equate synthetic or plant-based material with genuine animal-derived leather. Yet critics point out that this dynamic is familiar. It is a classic growing pain where old terminology struggles to keep up with modern innovation.
Deciding the value of materials
Debates over what can be called leather miss the larger shift in how materials are made and valued. Take, for example, the ice industry.
Originally, ice was seen as a ‘natural’ product, harvested from frozen lakes and rivers. When refrigeration technology emerged, the ‘natural ice’ industry insisted that this new machine-made ice was to be labelled as ‘artificial’, and launched smear campaigns to convince the public that it was unnatural, full of chemicals, and dangerous. This was pretty ironic given the dangerous origins of their ice, which was harvested from dirty rivers and lakes.
Today, it is just ice. Though the industry tried all kinds of tactics to protect its territory, the new technology eventually won. Why? Because it solved real-world problems of cost and performance. This same logic should be applied to how leather is viewed today.
Critics of alternative materials insist that only animal hide deserves the name leather, even though the term synthetic leather has been used since the 1970s. The concern seems to have bubbled up in just the last 10 years as newer and more eco-friendly materials have entered the scene.
Banning a term doesn’t change the underlying reality that brands’ and consumers’ definition of value has evolved. Brands want a product that is high quality, easy to scale to meet commercial needs, and offered at stable prices. Consumers want products that are aesthetically pleasing and reasonably priced, and modern shoppers are increasingly interested in how materials are sourced and produced.
Collaboration, not litigation
A more constructive response would acknowledge that innovation rarely eliminates tradition overnight; more often, it reshapes it. But this evolution requires a shift in how we view the relationship between tradition and innovation.
Heritage tanneries have a unique opportunity to help lead this transition by leveraging centuries of expertise in finishing, dyeing, and structural manipulation. These respected suppliers could partner with this new wave of biotech start-ups to refine their products and gain from it themselves.
Biomaterial innovators will ultimately succeed or fail based on the benefit they provide, rather than their labels. New innovations enable capabilities such as fragrance customisation, expanding the creative possibilities available to designers, shaving months off production timelines and significantly de-risking the supply chain for brands.
Legal battles can slow change, but they rarely halt it. If incumbent industries focus solely on protecting terminology, they risk overlooking the larger transformation of the materials economy.
This transition offers us a chance to move past the ‘leather vs non-leather’ binary and actually focus on creating a marketplace where materials are judged by their benefits to brands and consumers rather than their proximity to an animal.
https://www.greenqueen.com.hk/uncaged-innovations-vegan-leather-plant-based-milk-labels-oatly/
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