Leather Manufacturing

Meeting 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 natural and synthetic leathers to provide sustainability and aesthetics that consumers want, along with regulatory compliance that brand owners and manufacturers need.

Man taking inventory at a leather factory

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.

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Wet-end processesLeather finishing
  • 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 provide haptics and water-repellent performance.

More solutions, where to buy and further applications

The exclusive, global distributor for the brands described above is TFL.

Some DOWSIL™ Silicone Chemistries can be used in wet-end or finishing processes.

Many of these products are also suitable for synthetic leather finishing.

Luxurious car interior with leather

Luxurious leather alternatives

Dow provides a wide array of solutions to meet the growing demand for synthetic leather, including our new LuxSense™ Silicone Leather. Dow also offers polyurethane, polyvinyl chloride and bio-based products to create multilayer structures that are coated with traditional finishing products to mimic the texture, haptics and sensory properties of natural leather.

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LuxSense™ Silicone Leather

Witness the performance of our innovative technology, LuxSense™ Silicone Leather, designed to meet the needs for automotive interiors.

VITHANE™ Polyurethane Finishing Products

Dow offers a range of fully formulated polyurethane finishing products under the VITHANE™ brand for use by manufacturers of synthetic materials.

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