Why we chose them
Founded in 1975 in Cologna Veneta, near Verona, La Biesseuno is a family-owned Italian tannery specializing in deerskin. Their narrow focus and market specialization have given La Biesseuno (a relatively small, independent tannery) an outsized importance within the industry. Still privately held and family-run, La Biesseuno supplies leather throughout Europe and to markets including the United States, Mexico, India, and China. While most tanneries work across a broad catalogue of hides, La Biesseuno has spent more than fifty years concentrating its expertise on deer. It's a more specific leather that is far less uniform, and considerably more difficult to source and work with, than conventional calf or cowhide.
Deer are wild and relatively scarce. They are truly free-ranging animals, which ensures that every hide is different and subject to natural variations due to changing seasonal conditions and environments. Rather than forcing the natural variations found across hides into artificial uniformity, La Biesseuno relies on rigorous selection and five decades of accumulated tanning expertise to uphold the demanding standards required to qualify their leather as suitable for luxury goods.
La Biesseuno works with deer hides that are initially collected and pre-tanned in North America before undergoing the critical stages of retanning, dyeing, fatliquoring (working oils and lubricants into the leather fibre structure) and finishing at its facilities in Veneto. It states that only about 40% of the skins in the original batches (sourced from its American suppliers) meet production standards to move forward. They use a mixed chrome-and-tannin process, rather than relying on a single tanning system, allowing the leather to develop the particular balance of softness, fullness, and resilience for which its deerskin is valued. Fatliquoring is especially important when working with a material like deer hide to preserve its extraordinary suppleness as it is transformed into finished leather. The precise recipes and finishing methods are proprietary, but this combination reflects the real expertise of a specialist tanner. The natural grain is also preserved, along with the soft, individual characteristics that make each skin unique.
Their traditional specialty is supported by modern production standards, ensuring they hold occupational health and safety certifications and raw-material traceability credentials. La Biesseuno’s Arzignano operation (the second facility) is aligned with the main facility's standards, both having upgraded to renewable energy sources in recent years and working to reduce water consumption during the intensive tanning processes.
There are larger tanneries, and there are certainly tanneries working with more familiar luxury leathers. La Biesseuno matters because it chose to become exceptionally good at something few others specialize in. Its value lies not simply in producing deerskin, but in understanding and controlling an inherently imperfect material without removing the character that makes it desirable in the first place.
