"We believe that traceability is key to accountability"
Signe Marie Bakka Backhaus, Director of Design & Product Development at roccamore.
Signe Marie Bakka Backhaus
Signe Marie has been the lead of the collab from the very beginning and has been part of roccamore the last 4½ years. Before that Signe Marie has built up a deep knowledge of leather from her time at Ganni and from her many years living and working in Italy.
Learn about roccamore’s ambitions, learnings, and good pieces of advice when working with Nordic traceable leather. The collab with roccamore started in 2020 with the first launch of its traceable, handmade shoes, and ever since the traceable collection has grown within the complete range of women’s shoes.
30% of your roccamore shoes collection will be with SPOOR leather in 2024. Why and what drives this ambition?
Our ambition is transparency and traceability, that we want to provide to our customers. We can prove with the data set that SPOOR provides us, that the hides are a by-product of the dairy and meat industry, and that the cows were Danish. We can link the certificates of the tannery to the product page and provide that transparency per product and open up our supply chain by working with SPOOR. We believe that traceability is key to accountability.
What are your learnings so far with the SPOOR collection compared with non-traceable leather?
With the SPOOR hides we can track their journey from the beginning, when the calf or cow was born, when and where it was slaughtered, and in the end the tanning phase and how many pairs of shoes, we were able to make. This gives us a unique insight into a data set and the journey, that gives traceability all through the value chain. This is important if we want to evaluate our impact and what areas we can work with to do even better for the present and future. Compared to leather that is only traceable to the abattoir and does not have a data set before, we will know the country of origin but we will not have the rest of the data that is so important for the traceability and accountability.
How would you describe the SPOOR co-creation mindset and approach?
SPOOR works with a mindset of support, both in scoping the traceability but also supporting the brand to understand the difference between not traceable hides to the traceable hides. They give support in how to tell the story and give the traceability value. Finally, they provide a real partnership in how to set up the production and how to set up relations around the traceability and transparency agenda.
Which benefits does roccamore gain from using SPOOR leather?
We have a partner who is dedicated to the ambition of traceability and transparency and can lift the story together with us. At the same time, the data and insight they provide is very valuable.
A good piece of advice to other conscious brands who consider working with traceability?
Turn the way you do things around. Start with the raw material and what you want to do with it. And finally - what is your ambition and what is important to your brand?
roccamore x SPOOR
Roccamore purely works with premium leather qualities but so far the brand has not known where the leather came from. The quality was guaranteed but its origin and how the animal had been raised, the supplier could not stand up for. That has changed with the partnership with SPOOR.
- When SPOOR contacted me and presented the technology which guarantees the traceability of my raw material – directly to the Danish cow or calf – I was blown. As the first brand, we have 100% documentation of our raw materials. Where was the cow born? Where did it grow up? Who took care of it, and what was the animal welfare like? That knowledge makes it possible for us to take an even greater responsibility, says roccamore’s founder Frederikke Antonie Schmidt. Roccamore was founded in 2014 by Frederikke Antonie Schmidt who wanted to disrupt the traditional shoe business and create a transparent sustainable business model.
- Sustainability and circular economy mean everything to us, and the whole mindset for how I want to do business is sustainably carried out as opposed to how the norm was previously in the business. The leather is a by-product from the food industry, but the animal has lived a life before the hide became a beautiful piece of leather. And this is an aspect our business has not engaged in previously, says Frederikke Antonie Schmidt.