Leather Grades: What Your Invoice Commits To

A first-time buyer reads the invoice for the price. The words next to the price are the part that decides whether you can hold anyone to anything — and one of them quietly changes the customs heading of the finished shoe.

A guide by TL San Martín, a tannery of origin in Elda (Alicante, Spain) since 1995, LWG Gold certified under the Leather Manufacturer standard.

Your first leather invoice will describe the goods in five or six words. Something like genuine leather, black, 1.4 mm, 120 sq ft. Every one of those words is doing legal work, and only one of them — the thickness — means what you think it means. This guide translates the rest, because when a batch arrives wrong, the argument is fought over the description on the document, not over what anybody said on the phone.

If you have not bought leather before, read what leather actually is first, then come back to the paperwork.

Why does "genuine leather" commit your supplier to almost nothing?

Because it is not a grade. It is not defined in EN 15987, it carries no quality tier, and it does not tell you whether the grain is intact, whether the piece is a split, or where on the animal it was cut.

In the trade it survives as a marketing phrase from retail — the stamp on the inside of a wallet. In a supply contract it is close to meaningless: a top-grain calf upper and a heavily corrected split can both be invoiced as genuine leather without anybody lying. What you gain by removing it from your purchase order is a supplier who now has to write something specific instead.

The specific words do exist. They are in the European terminology standard, and they have numbers attached.

What does EN 15987 actually define?

EN 15987:2022 — Leather. Terminology. Key definitions for the leather trade — is the document your supplier's description has to survive. Four entries decide most disputes:

Two practical readings of that table. First, the 0.15 mm line is the one that separates a material you can sell as leather from one you cannot, and it is measurable — you can ask for it. Second, bonded and split are not insults; they are legitimate materials with legitimate uses. They just cost less to make, and you should be paying accordingly and specifying deliberately. Where each of them belongs on a shoe is covered in full grain, corrected grain and split.

A term you will also see, and which the standard does not rank: top grain. In practice it means the grain side has been lightly corrected — buffed and re-coated — so it is a real distinction from full grain, but it is a description of process, not a quality tier. Ask what was buffed off and how thick the coat is.

Which word on the invoice changes your customs heading?

This is the one with money attached, and almost nobody selling leather mentions it.

In the Combined Nomenclature, **heading 6403 covers footwear with outer soles of rubber, plastics, leather or composition leather and uppers of leather.** Note the wording: the sole list includes composition leather, the upper list does not. Composition leather — the customs term for bonded or reconstituted leather, classified in its own right under heading 4115 — is treated as a separate material from leather throughout chapter 41, and chapter 64 follows the same logic.

The consequence: a shoe whose upper is bonded or composition leather does not belong in 6403. It is not 6404 (textile upper) and not 6402 (rubber or plastics upper) either, so it lands in 6405, where uppers "of leather or composition leather" are explicitly named. Same shoe, same factory, same rubber sole — different heading, because of one word describing the upper.

That matters for three reasons, in ascending order of expense:

1. The duty rate differs between the two headings.
2. Your declarant cannot get it right if your own purchase documents say genuine leather, because that phrase does not tell them whether the upper is leather or composition leather.
3. If the heading is corrected later, the exposure is back-duty on every consignment already cleared, plus penalties — and you will be reconstructing the material composition of shipments you no longer have.

We are a tannery, not a customs broker. Classification is your declarant's decision, and the same product can be coded differently depending on details we never see. Verify any heading in the EU's official TARIC database, or GOV.UK's Trade Tariff for the United Kingdom. What we can tell you is the part your declarant cannot look up: the exact composition of the material you bought. The chapter-64 mechanics themselves are set out in footwear HS classification.

What should the invoice line actually say?

Six fields. Ask for them in the quotation, before there is anything to argue about — they are the same six that should appear on your first leather order.

• Term from EN 15987 — leather, coated leather, bonded leather or split. Not genuine, not real, not natural.
• Animal and type — bovine, goat, calf. This drives grain size and the price per square foot more than any adjective.
• Substance with tolerance — 1.4 mm ± 0.1 mm, not 1.4 mm. At this calibre 0.1 mm is 7 % of the material. The reasoning is in leather thickness for shoe uppers.
• Article and colour reference — the tannery's own article name plus the dated lab dip, so the next order can be matched to it. See sample-to-bulk consistency.
• Unit and measured area — square feet or square metres, and who measured. Leather is sold by area, and the area is machine-measured at the tannery.
• Lot or batch number — the one thing that makes every test report, certificate and complaint traceable to actual goods.

A tannery can put all six on the document because it made the material. An intermediary is copying a description it received, which is the practical difference explored in tannery vs distributor — and the reason a vague invoice is often a signal about who you are actually buying from, not about sloppiness.

Where all of this sits in the wider set of decisions a new footwear brand makes is mapped in our leather for shoes hub. If you want to compare the words against the material in your hand, request samples and read the delivery note alongside them.

Comparing two suppliers — or two invoices that say the same thing?

The open board at tlsanmartin.com/#community is our free B2B board for leather and footwear: no fee, no intermediary. Post a material request under Materials with the six fields above and see which suppliers can answer all of them. If you need a workshop to make the shoe rather than a tannery to make the leather, Partners & factories is the right category.

TL San Martín tans and finishes leather in Elda, Alicante, since 1995: LWG Gold under the Leather Manufacturer standard — the only standard under which a Gold medal exists at all; a Trader tops out at “Approved”. Request samples before you specify anything.