Leather Fabrication

Addressing aspirations for sustainability and aesthetics

From footwear and fashion accessories to furniture and automotive upholstery, consumers desire the luxurious look and feel of leather – but they also expect both sustainability and safety. Dow offers solutions for leather and synthetic to offer sustainability and aesthetics that consumers want, along with regulatory compliance that brand owners and manufacturers need.

Leather

Synthetic Leather

Enhancing look, feel and performance

To produce the soft, durable and functional leather for everyday applications, leather manufacturers rely on a range of chemistries, including binders, lubricants, processing aids and additives. Dow offers a portfolio of proprietary silicone, acrylic and polyurethane chemistries, combined with leather application experience. This powerful combination helps formulators develop both the high-performance coatings needed for use in tanneries – and the solutions that support wet-end processes.

Wet-End Process

LEUKOTAN™ Tanning Agents can be used with or to replace aromatic syntans and vegetable extracts
Our distinct acrylic and hybrid chemistries, including LUBRITAN™ Acrylic Retans, can be used as full or partial replacements of fatliquors to offer haptics and water-repellent performance.

Leather Finishing

OPTI-MATT™ Dullers, HYDRHOLAC™ Dullers and PRIMAL™ Emulsions offer final gloss or soft-matting effects.
Silicone ROSILK™ Feel Modifiers help coating formulators enhance properties such as luxurious hand feel, abrasion and chemical resistance, as well as anti-soiling and anti-squeak.

Luxurious leather alternatives

Dow offers a wide array of solutions to address the growing demand for synthetics, including our LuxSense™ Silicone Leather. Dow also offers polyurethane and acrylics to create multilayer structures that are coated with traditional finishing products to mimic the texture, haptics and sensory properties of leather.