UNIC elects Alessandro Iliprandi as president in 80th assembly

A leadership change at UNIC landed just as Italian tanning was trying to steady itself. Alessandro Iliprandi, CEO of Bonaudo Spa, was elected the association’s 19th president at its 80th general assembly in Santa Croce sull’Arno, and the choice points straight at the questions that matter downstream: how the sector protects leather quality, traceability and supply for the tanners, finishers and small makers who buy sides and panels.

UNIC said the gathering, held at Po.Te.Co. on June 12, marked 80 years of associative, industrial and cultural history for an organization founded on April 9, 1946. It also underlined the scale of the business behind the material: Italian tanning is valued at about 4 billion euros, accounts for 67% of EU leather production and 25% of global production. In a trade built on consistency, those numbers explain why a vote in Santa Croce sull’Arno matters far beyond the conference hall.

The assembly also named Matteo Mastrotto of Rino Mastrotto Group, former president Fabrizio Nuti of Nuti Ivo Group and Gianni Russo of Russo di Casandrino as vice presidents for the next mandate. That lineup suggests UNIC is pairing renewal with familiar industrial experience at a moment when the sector is under pressure. UNIC said 2025 production fell nearly 6% in value, 4% in volume and exports declined 5%, a squeeze that will be felt in tannery books before it shows up in the cutting room.

Iliprandi said it was "a particularly difficult moment for the sector" and set out a familiar but pointed agenda: stronger collaboration with customers across the supply chain, more incisive European representation, and support for training and leather culture, especially for younger generations and broader skills diffusion. For leatherworkers, that reads less like abstract trade politics than a signal about the conditions that shape what eventually reaches the bench: what gets produced, how it is documented and how steadily it can be sourced.

Fabrizio Nuti, who led UNIC for six years, framed the association as more than a representative body, describing it as a place for debate and growth that helps companies defend and enhance their production model. The assembly also presented RADICI, a commemorative volume tracing eight decades of the Italian tanning sector from the postwar years to the present, and LaConceria linked the handover to recent lobbying on the EU Deforestation Regulation and Italy’s rules on the proper use of leather terms such as cuoio and pelle.

Iliprandi’s background matches the signal UNIC seems to be sending. Bonaudo says he joined the company in 1994 at age 24 and now oversees five certified hubs across Lombardy, Veneto and Tuscany. For an industry that lives or dies on consistency, certification and trust, that is exactly the kind of resume that suggests the next chapter at UNIC will be written in the language of hides, standards and the long road from tannery floor to workbench.