Billy Tannery
Jack Millington, founder of Billy Tannery, a unique leather company breaking traditional molds. Born from a mission to repurpose discarded goatskins, This led to establishing the UK's first tannery in over 50 years.
Edition 3 Feature (September 2021)
Words by: Jack Millington
Location: Midlands, UK
Photo Credit: ©Christopher Proctor @clproctor_photo / James Holborrow @department_two / ©Jack Millington
My name is Jack Millington and I’m the founder of Billy Tannery, a new kind of leather company. Rather than focus on selling leather as a traditional tannery would, we primarily produce our leather for our own range of leather goods, which are made in UK workshops.
The business was born from the discovery that many thousands of goatskins left over from the UK meat and dairy industry were being discarded each year. With the decline of the UK leather industry, there were simply no tanneries left to take them, so most were sadly going to landfill or being burned, which is such a terrible waste. What initially started as a side project to my day job in marketing snowballed into building the first new tannery in the UK for over 50 years and, to my knowledge, the first ever built on a farm here.
