The Shop at the Tannery sells bowties, change purses, cigarette cases, and jewelry crafted from scaly, supple leather. At first touch, these wares seem to be made from the reptilian skin of a snake or a crocodile.
They’re not. They’re made from fish.
This tannery, Sjávarleður, or Atlantic Leather, stands on a side street in Sauðárkrókur, a fishing town on a mountainous, damp fjord on Iceland’s northwest coast. It’s the only enterprise in Europe that transforms discarded fish skin into sleek leather products.
It’s also the last bastion of a once-robust Icelandic industry. Since the 12th century, Icelanders have practiced tanning, a chemical process that extracts all living matter from an animal’s skin, says Sigríður Sigurðardóttir, a historian and curator of the Skagafjörður Heritage Museum, also in northwest Iceland. Tanning was an important practical activity, but it was also part of the country’s culture: girls were told that the quality of the first pair of leather shoes they sewed would foretell the quality of their marriages, and children who were born on bearskins were said to never feel cold.
Then, in the 20th century, tanning became a small but brisk industry in Iceland, with approximately 10 operations employing hundreds throughout the country. These tanning factories pickled fox skins and tanned seal skins; they made leather liner for anoraks and sewed gloves.
But as the century died, so did demand for this labor-intensive product. Tanning, says Sigurðardóttir, involves breeding animals, waiting for them to mature, hunting them, slaughtering them, and then turning their skins into wearable clothing.
It takes a lot of hands or machines or time, and it’s expensive, says Sigurðardóttir. They didn’t have any market for it. And today, we don’t have much market for it. So that’s it.
In 1991, Steinunn Gunnsteindóttir and her family, the owners of Sjávarleður, found themselves confronting this uncomfortable reality. Gunnsteindóttir’s parents had purchased the tannery in the 1970s and started processing sheepskins, but the rise of cheap synthetic fleeces, as well as the newly unstable market in the collapsing Soviet Union, put the tannery in a precarious spot.
Then, the family heard about a Canadian company that made fish leather. The family thought that developing this innovative, unusual product just might save their tannery. They wanted to buy the technique from the Canadians, but they didn’t have the money, so they decided to develop it themselves.
The first 200 tries were just fish soup. Mushy fish soup, Gunnsteindóttir says.
Now, though, Sjávarleður’s products are sold to the high-fashion industry. Fish skin is a durable, sustainable substitute to snake skin and crocodile skin, says Gunnsteindóttir, and their leather was named best in the world at a Hong Kong exhibition in 2013.
2018 Atlas Obscura