"chance"
It all started in 2020, when a leather wholesaler approached us with a suggestion to try developing leather using Kyoto's Kuroge Wagyu beef.
At the time, I had a lot of free time due to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, so I went around talking to a variety of businesses, including tanners, hide dealers, and meat manufacturers.
What surprised me was that leather was delivered to the raw leather shop almost every day.
And it is difficult to dispose of them by burning or burying them.
When you eat meat, the skin inevitably comes out. It's a natural thing if you think about it, but as someone from a different industry, the sight of the piled-up skin was quite shocking to me. Even though I was interested in delicious meat, I had no reason to think about the skin.
The skins that are produced in this way are processed into leather and reused as materials, but they cannot be consumed domestically, and more than half of them are exported overseas. Hearing this story was what made me decide to try my hand at developing locally produced, locally consumed Kyoto leather.
"The first release of Kyoto-made leather!"
After about a year of repeated prototypes, we finally made our signature mini wallet out of the finished leather and put it up for crowdfunding. The response was much bigger than we expected! Both the person in charge and I were overjoyed, but when we started mass-producing it, we discovered a problem: the more we made, the more wasted leather we had to throw away.
Unable to find an effective solution, we had to produce a lot of leather to prepare all the products ordered, taking into account losses, which meant we were left with a large amount of inventory.
In addition, it would be difficult to make it a standard product because of the high risk of profit if it were to be sold continuously. It was like going from heaven to hell. I was at a loss as to what to do with the huge amount of inventory.