Brands: Sam Setter's 'Pills' - For readers who need some wry medicinal humour

When you read the ‘big’ leather magazines and the position of the major leather industry auditing company, they all heavily focus on ‘the brands’, who by now have become the centre of their interest as if they are the most precious and important industrial entities in the world. In reality these brands are moneymaking machines whose only interest is to dominate the market. Recently various top fashion brands have bought up tanneries, leather goods factories and competing brands, creating monopolising conglomerates. The number of independent producers is reducing year after year. The top brands are each a financial powerhouse, who can impose their will with only one objective to make more and more money. The cost is that the diversification in the leather business becomes less and less, which also means in my view that the creativity of individuals is more and more confined by what’s decided in the boardroom.