Iceland review - 2002, Side 57

The next time you indulge yourself with an
excellent pair of leather shoes and stick
your face in the box to inhale the luxury of
your purchase, think about two things.
Number one, that is not an organic smell
that you associate with fine-quality leather.
It’s a chemical treatment. Number two, if
those shoes were made of fish skin, they
would smell exactly the same, and you’d be
infinitely more hip.
Sjávarledur is a fish tannery in
Saudárkrókur, north Iceland, a region where
the big business is horse breeding, and
there is not a macrobiotic bistro for as far
as the eye can see. The seven-man compa-
ny shares its headquarters with a sheepskin
tannery. There, Sjávarledur director and
head artisan Fridrik Jónsson fine tunes the
latest screen prints and metallic tints for
the fish leather he sells to accessory design-
ers in Europe. Seeing Jónsson bent over a
tiger-striped piece of salmon skin, his col-
leagues have to laugh.
Of course, they’re tanning sheepskin for
Louis Vuitton, so they can only laugh for so
long.
What is going on in this remote corner of
Iceland? In 1989, Fridrik Jónsson was tan-
ning lambskin for jackets when he heard
about fish leather. “I started doing some tri-
als with the different skins,” Jónsson says.
He continued to experiment for the next six
years. In 1996, Sjávarledur was born. In
February of 2001, its goods were strutting
down the runway of Christian Dior.
Jónsson uses three fish skins – wolf fish,
salmon, and Nile perch – to make his
leather. Wolf fish is the hardest to come by
as it is not farmed and is fished for in Russia
from the Barents Sea. Nile perch, imported
from Lake Victoria in Africa, is the priciest.
Jónsson says “you can make leather out of
any kind of fish skin with our technology”,
which, for the record, is top secret. What
we do know is it takes eight fish skins to
make a small purse, and 60 to make a
trench coat. Not exactly the most practical
material.
So why is fish leather being picked up by
cutting-edge designers? Independent
Icelandic designer and Sjávarledur market-
ing guru Sigrún Úlfarsdóttir illuminates:
“The fashion world has this strong urge for
something new and it can’t just be any-
thing new. It has to be new, and a continu-
ation of what was new last year. Designers
have finished with the reptile leathers.
They wanted something in the same vein,
but different.” Enter fish leather, also an
eco-friendly by-product of the fishing
industry, stepping in right when rare snake-
skin was both passé and starting to get too
rare to keep slinging on the shoulders of
the ladies who lunch.
Nýsköpunarsjódur, the Icelandic govern-
ment business venture fund, invested in
the company in 1995, playing a significant
role in Sjávarledur’s success. The organisa-
tion’s leap of faith in a small domestic com-
pany enabled it to take its business to the
international market. Today, the district of
Skagafjördur, Reykjavík-based designer
Eggert, and Fridrik share ownership in the
company.
In 1999, Fridrik was searching for the
right market for his leather when he was
introduced to Sigrún, who was working as
an accessory designer in Paris. “We’ve come
far in two or three years,” Sigrún says. “It is
quite interesting for a small company –
which is not even in Reykjavík – to be cater-
ing to companies that are leaders in their
field and in the world. I think Icelandic
companies usually don’t manage to do it.”
Sjávarledur’s domestic market is quite
small. With a current roster of 30-40 clients,
Fridrik estimates that 80 percent are in the
fashion industry. “That is certainly where
our energy is,” he says.
Cornering the fish market
Sjávarledur is the only company of its kind.
“I personally think that if there was no
Sjávarledur, there would be no fish-skin
trend,” speculates Sigrún. The companies
that do make fish leather in France, South
Africa and South America are one- and
two-person operations that are uninterest-
ed in catching Gucci’s attention.
“One of the first things we discussed was
how to market merchandise that there was
no demand for. Nobody knew that it exist-
ed.” Well, not nobody – it’s been around in
Iceland, but fish skin doesn’t exactly have
the same ring in Reykjavík as it might to the
landlocked fashionistas of Luxembourg.
Sjávarledur had to convince people that it
would work, and they had to convince the
right people.
“Fridrik is not going to put the effort
into developing a product for five or ten
years and then sell it to make bookmarks
for tourists in Norway,” Sigrún comments.
Personal attachment aside, Fridrik esti-
mates that his leather can be four to five
times more expensive than conventional
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