How Bad Leather Goods Wild Boar Leather is Made

This is a heavy-duty and water-resistant leather that was painstakingly developed over five years by Wisconsin’s Gallun Leathers. It’s rugged and distinct in a completely unique way due to both scars from the animal’s life and prominent follicles from their thick, quill-like hair. 

Our leather is combination tanned, meaning it combines elements from both of the two primary ways of tanning leather: chrome tanning and vegetable tanning. The final product combines millennia-old techniques with modern chemistry to bring you the best leather possible.

The chrome tanning makes the leather less reactive to sunlight and more water-resistant, heat-resistant, and ultraviolet light-resistant. The vegetable retan gives it some extra body, stiffness, and malleability. These steps are combined with many others, like using beaver felt to buff several coats of wax, to make an extraordinarily tough and beautiful product that can last for decades. 

There are two reasons you haven’t heard much about wild boar leather. 

The Scars

The first is that they’re violent animals that live in the wild: that means they have a lot of scars, and so will your bag. Animals raised in farms still have scars from the occasional thorns and ticks, but it’s much easier to find enough unblemished leather in a hide. 

But scars are cool, and people not wanting scars on their leather goods means a lot of the world’s leather is wasted. We like the scars, and it’s one of the reasons your Bad Leather Good won’t just have a cool story, it’ll look different to anyone else’s leather goods as well.

A tannery worker at Gallun Leathers inspects the final product 

Why Wild Boar Leather Is So Hard to Make

The other reason you haven’t found wild boar leather before is that it’s really hard to make and really hard to work with. 

Wild boar are nothing but trouble when they’re alive, and for a long time, they were nothing but trouble when they were dead, too: the meat doesn’t taste great (and is a bit too likely to be swimming with parasites anyway), and we couldn’t make great leather out of it either.

There are several reasons:

1. The Toughness: These hides have a very dense, firm, and tight fiber structure; it’s tough. They’re wild animals with a mean streak, spending their lives fighting each other and storming through every kind of thorny underbrush.
   
   Because wild boar hides are so tough, certain enzymes need to be used at the tannery that aren’t needed when processing cattle.
   
   They’re also unusual because they have a “shell”: an extremely tough membrane around the tail that follows different rules from your usual animal skin. But the hide’s toughness is also inconsistent: the difference in toughness between the neck and the butt is huge, and it presents a real challenge at the tannery.
   
2. The Hair: It’s closer to porcupine quills than normal mammal hair, which is why the follicles are so prominent on your Bad Leather Goods. Dehairing (or “beaming”) a hide is one of the first steps in the production of leather, but the processes for dehairing your usual cowhide or goatskin just didn’t work on feral swine.
   
   
3. The Grease: Hogs are greasy. It’s actually good to have an oily leather because it adds water resistance and the moisture improves longevity (similar to how moisturizing your skin keeps it from drying and cracking).
   
   But that kind of oil gets added later in the process. For various technical and chemical reasons, you don’t want the hide to be all greasy from the get go: hides get degreased after the dehairing, and it’s very hard to degrease wild boar.
   
   
4. The Color: We’d seen one or two brands make wild boar leather boots before, but the color was blotchy and inconsistent. Tanneries just had trouble getting the hides to hold dye and pigment.

How Gallun Leathers Solved Wild Boar Leather's Challenges

But one man cracked the code. Ed Gallun is a fifth-generation leather tanner who works in Wisconsin and Tennessee, regularly driving stacks of pickled animal hides back and forth across the states’ borders.

Figuring out how to make the world’s first good wild boar leather was a five-year process, but solving these problems dealt a powerful blow to the feral menace. Finally, wild boar had an upside: we can use their hides to make cool gear.

Our leather is semi-chrome, or combination tanned: the hide is preserved with chrome, then Ed adds oils, plant extracts, and dyes, and it gets a vegetable tan. 

The vegetable tannins give the leather some extra body, stiffness, and malleability, while the chrome tanning makes it less reactive to sunlight and more water-resistant, heat-resistant, and ultraviolet light-resistant.

This combination tanning combines the benefits of the two main ways of making leather: chrome tanning and vegetable tanning. Have your cake and eat it too. 

The 2 Kinds of Wild Boar Leather We Sell

Bad Leather Goods actually sells two kinds of Gallun Leathers’ wild boar, which Ed calls Jabari and Waxy. 

Cognac & Black Jabari 

This is our full-grain leather, meaning the outer layer of the animal’s skin is intact. The Jabari leather highlights the hide’s unusual character: the hair follicles are more prominent, and the scars are more visible.

It receives a clear wax polish on top that’s then ironed and brushed with beaver felt so that the leather better absorbs the polish. 

“No pigments are used on the Jabari; it’s pure aniline,” says Ed. “So you’re seeing everything in the leather. Scratches, scars, pores, the whole nine yards.”

The Waxy Chocolate

The surface of the waxy boar is a little more velvety to the touch because it’s been slightly buffed: Ed uses sandpaper to remove a tiny part of the skin’s outer layer before rolling several layers of wax onto it. 

This process slightly softens the appearance of the scars and follicles (don’t forget the follicles) while adding more texture to the surface because more skin fibers are exposed. 

Both leathers are casual, but in slightly different ways: 

• Jabari is full grain, so it’s smoother but shows more character and scars.

• Waxy Boar’s surface is a little less scarred, but has more texture and tonal variance.

Both leathers are jam packed with character and unlike any other leather you’ve handled.