SIX-YEAR ODYSSEY
A Corkman (who else) has invented a way of making leather goods from salmon skin. Michael Clifford reports.
JOHN Fitzgerald was hauling nets off the coast of Kerry when the idea of salmon skins for the fashion industry hit him. Here was a natural resource that largely went to waste, yet the texture of the skin was so attractive and so much stronger than it appeared: Why not?
Six years later his salmon skin leather products are proving to be a big hit with both the retail trade and the corporate sector.
The notion of leather being fashioned from domestic salmon has fired the imagination of people looking for a unique departure in leather; which also boasts eco-friendly origins. Wallets, credit card holders, hip flasks and handbags are among the products that are on the Christmas market, most prominently in Witchcraft in Temple Bar.
For Cork-born Fitzgerald getting his salmon into the shops is not so much an entrepreneurial triumph as the realisation of a dream.
"It has become an obsession," Fitzgerald says. "Since I got it into my head it has been the whole focus of my working life. Along the way I had to do various things to scrape by, and there were ups and downs when we were trying to perfect the tanning technique".
Fitzgerald was fishing out of Derrynane in south Kerry when he came up with the idea."Initially I fooled around with taxidermist kits to see if there was any way of getting it off the ground. But the tanning is highly intricate, the extent of which I didn't actually find out until I really got stuck into it," He says.
He pursued his dream to Dublin to suss out any interest among designers and the burghers of the fashion industry. The response encouraged him to persevere and after a year of research he got into the British school of leather technique in the University of Northampton. "It took the best part of two years, but in the end we got it right. The lecturers were thrilled because they didn't have the formula for it before and it was something totally new for them."
The tanning technique designed in Northampton involves 11 stages of maturity, over a period of two weeks, before the skins are pinned out to dry into their final form. Fitzgerald is reluctant to reveal the specifics. "I spent two years perfecting this, so its not something that you give away. The structure of the fish skin is completely different to the mammal, so suffice to say that normal tanning techniques don't apply."
The other property of the fish skin that differentiates it from the mammal is the strength of the skin, which despite initial impressions is actually of a more durable nature.
"Because the fish has to live in both fresh and salt water and under different atmospheres, its tensile strength is much greater than that of a mammal. So it is actually longer lasting."
Having perfected the scientific end, Fitzgerald turned to the business end of affairs and set up the Irish Salmon Skin Leather Company. For Fitzgerald the future looks busy but the sense of achievement is something he likes to dwell on. For reference he quotes the poem Donal Og from the collection of Irish poems from the 16th and 17th century, 'Poems of the dispossessed '
" A thing you promised me and it impossible,
You would give me gloves made from the skin of fishes…", goes one particular line.
"Impossible is as impossible does", is Fitzgerald's quick response.
Sunday Tribune nov. 2001
