Ecco launches shoe made from leather waste fibre with Spinnova

Ecco just turned a leather-production by-product into a finished shoe, and that is the part that matters. The limited-edition ECCO BIOM® 720, launched on 29 April 2026, puts Spinnova’s leather-waste fibre into market-facing footwear for the first time, making this less about a clever concept and more about whether the material can survive contact with real commerce.

The fibre starts with wet blue shavings, the thin layers trimmed away to keep leather thickness consistent. Instead of dissolving the waste with chemicals, Spinnova uses mechanical refining, a quieter industrial move with louder implications: the material keeps the natural integrity of the leather fibre rather than getting pushed into a lower-value afterlife. Spinnova says the result has tensile strength comparable to wool and elongation at break roughly twice that of cotton, which is the kind of performance data that separates an interesting sustainability story from a serious materials contender. The waste stream itself is not trivial. Spinnova and ECCO say these by-products are typically discarded, burned for energy or composted during leather production.

The bigger commercial signal is how long this has been in motion. ECCO and Spinnova began working together in 2020 through a joint venture focused on turning leather by-product raw materials into textile fibres. By July 2024, Spinnova said it was gearing up for a commercial launch through Respin, its 50/50 joint venture with ECCO and KT Trading. The companies had already said the fibre could be used in footwear, garments and leather accessories without potentially hazardous chemicals, which put it squarely in the conversation around what material innovation is supposed to do: replace part of the virgin input stack, not just decorate it.

That is why the BIOM 720 matters more than a normal sneaker release. Janne Poranen described the launch as the culmination of more than five years of development work with ECCO, and Thomas Gøgsig said the two companies are pushing what footwear can be by combining their expertise. The real test now is not whether the fibre can be talked about, but whether it can be produced consistently, at scale, and at a cost that makes sense beyond a limited run. If it can, leather waste stops being an industrial afterthought and starts looking like a legitimate feedstock for modern footwear.