He takes leather bags apart and analyzes them to understand their value, and then he tells all about it in videos that go viral. Content creator and almost a leather science popularizer, Volkan Yilmaz, better known as Tanner Leatherstein, is among the 500 most influential people in the fashion world. The influencer, who has more than a million followers on TikTok (and almost another million on other platforms), is one of the 100 new entries in Business Of Fashion’s famous BoF 500 ranking. And we, at La Conceria interviewed him at our booth during Lineapelle 104 (Fieramilano Rho, September 17-19). At the Meet & Greet event (pictured), organized in collaboration with “Is it leather?” to discuss how to communicate on leather in the digital world.
Between quality and marketing
“I started posting on social media because I wanted to help people better understand what they were buying. Many of my friends would come to me asking me: can you check if this bag is real?, is it good?, did I pay too much for it? These questions have been with me all my life“, Yilmaz explains. People love leather, they like to buy it and use it, but they don’t feel comfortable evaluating it themselves. Even if it’s just to see if it’s real leather or not, to distinguish the value of a product from what is just marketing. You cannot think that an item is of high quality just because it is very expensive. There is a knowledge gap in consumers. And I want to use social media to express my perspective, to spread my knowledge about leather so that people can make better choices”.
Passion and curiosity
Yilmaz, aka Tanner Leatherstein, has loved leather since the age of 11: that is, since he made his first sheepskin jacket. Over 25 years he honed his skills, deeply influenced by his family’s leather craft tradition in Turkey. He increased his experience by moving to the United States in 2009 and founding his own leather goods brand: Pegai. What drew him to the world of social media is a curiosity to understand (and make people understand) the true value of leather products. “I was never a customer of luxury brands”, he tells us, “but it’s been five or six years since I created my brand. So I started looking around to try to understand how it was possible for leather bags to have such high prices. And that’s how it all started”.
First video
“I once called the customer service department of a famous brand to ask why a bag cost $1,200, and the answer I received was just made of marketing statements”, Tanner says: unconcreted arguments lacking substance. I created a discussion and that became my first viral video”. Another time, however, he took apart a bag from a well-known American brand and discovered that it was actually made of fake leather. “From there many people started asking me if I could do the same thing with other bags from major brands. I just followed what they asked”, he says, smiling, aware of the huge impact her videos have had on the public.
Telling the skin on social
Tanner started at TikTok, then began posting the same content on Instagram and grew from there. He then added YouTube, where he could upload longer in-depth and storytelling videos. “I don’t want everyone to like me. I don’t think that’s possible”, he explains. “Everyone has their own opinion and perspective. And I respect that. If I get comments that I can respond to, I gladly do, but if they are just attacks or attempts to start a spat, I don’t respond. I don’t have to. Because what I do is just share my experience and knowledge on leather for people who understand that. And if you don’t like these things, you cannot look at them and that’s okay”.
“Vegan fundamentalists”
“I totally respect the vegan lifestyle. But I am very sad when there are those who sell plastic and advertise it as an environmentally friendly or vegan material, when in fact it comes from the oil industry and will turn into microplastics once it is disposed of. It’s clear that it is an item that will last a short time and will soon break down and deteriorate. To blame leather for animal cruelty is to hide the fact that leather is a by-product of the meat industry.
Which very few people know, unfortunately”. What Tanner Leatherstein also wants to do is to raise awareness of leather for its natural and essentially upcycling origin. “Part of my mission is to get that very thing understood. Fortunately, there are a lot of people who want to know and understand. All my content is about that. Young people especially, those in Generation Z, want to understand the real meaning behind things. They don’t look at advertising content, they avoid it, but if they see an individual speaking who puts passion into it, they open their eyes and listen. They recognize someone with real passion who is giving them information that others are not giving them”.
Read also:
- See you at Lineapelle together with the influencers of Is It Leather?
- Is It Leather: the superpower of leather is telling the truth
- Gianni Russo: the three factors for managing this structural crisis
