Branding and Crisis Management

TOXIC LEATHER FURNITURE CAN BE TOXIC FOR THE INDUSTRY?

All industries need to be proactive in protecting their image.  This means monitoring social network sites and preparing positioning papers on all sorts of issues. It also means that you have to respond quickly to what is going on. In the the leather industry this has always been lacking with key industry organisations feigning fear of pressure groups or lack of cash. Now the IULTCS has decided to make a start and below is a press release to set the record state on all the "toxic leather furniture" we have been reading about over the last year in the UK. It is a case of  "thank goodness" and "at long last" and I do hope all the tanneries and national bosies will put their PR in gear and send out beyond the usual trade magazines. I will put all such releases up on this site as they come out.

IULTCS, 3 February, 2009: It has come to the attention of the IUL commission that some news releases regarding the call for banning dimethyl fumarate from consumer articles in the EU may be misleading. A review of some of the mainstream media¹ reports show that they correctly report "The chemical is placed in sachets which are then put inside furniture and shoe boxes to kill mould that would otherwise hurt the products during transport and storage in humid climates." If this clarification is absent it may therefore be concluded by readers that the fungicide is used during the manufacture of leather. This is not correct and the oversight places the leather industry and chemical suppliers to the leather industry under unwarranted suspicion. As far as the IUL can determine from initial enquiry, dimethyl fumarate is not used by any tanneries, and has not been used by the tanning industry for the preservation of finished leather. In addition, the statement that dimethyl fumarate is "often used in everyday consumer products such as leather sofas and shoes" appears to be a gross exaggeration and not an accurate depiction of the facts.

Readers should also not confuse the "DMF" acronym used in this news story with other chemistries that are more widely referred to as DMF - e.g. dimethylformamide and dimethyl furan.

Reference

http://health.yahoo.com/news/afp/euconsumerchemicalhealthrecall_20090129202515.html