Scaling Up, French Firm Fashions Fish Skins For Luxury Market

Three friends, who met when studying chemical engineering near Paris and taught themselves the tanning process from scratch, are trying to change that.

“Salmon skin has a suppleness, and a finesse, it’s less than half a millimetre thick, but with a resistance which is nearly equivalent to cow leather,” said Benjamin Malatrait, one of the three friends, who co-founded a company called Ictyos.

“It has a grain which is more marked, with the scales that are a bit reminiscent of lizard,” he said at his firm’s workshop near the French city of Lyon. “Visually its quite exotic.”

Their firm has been given a six-month stint inside a startup incubator run by Paris-based global fashion giant LVMH, owner of brands such as Louis Vuitton and Christian Dior. The idea is that the incubator’s graduates land deals with LVMH fashion houses.