Leather Connollising

Leather connollising is the name given to the process of recolouring leather.

The name comes from the Connolly Leather company who for many years provided the leather for top car manufacturers including Aston-Martin, Jaguar and Rolls-Royce. They have a process of applying a cellulose based paint to the leather which would give long lasting strong colours, coupled with their high quality leather hides, this was a winning combination.

Although Connolly Leather Ltd went bankrupt in 1987 their technique for colouring leather lived on and still does with cellulose based leather paints still available - although EU regulations mean that as of 2007, the manufacture of cellulose and other spirit based paints has been outlawed. This means that from the end of 2007, all car paints need to be emulsion instead.

Emulsion paints have something of a bad reputation, despite being much healthier for the people using them they have in the past had a tendency to be soft, fade easy and be difficult to work with. Worse still, in relation to leather recolouring, the paint wiped off!

At New again (formerly Clean Image) we had some rather nasty experiences while cleaning and reconditioning the leather of our customer's cars. We often found that our cleaners and conditioners were revealing repairs by making these acrylic emulsions straight off, this left us with a huge problem and we still have to carefully inspect cars for signs of recolouring before we can begin work. Customers often bring cars to us with this paint peeling (like a bad case of sunburn) or with the repair a very different colour to the rest of the leather work.

Many of these problems were the result of off-the-shelf D.I.Y. kits with ready mixed colours, and with the person applying the paint poorly preparing the leather. Although may of the 'professional' repairs we nearly as bad due to the poor quality of the paint.

This is why sought out traditional leather connollising as an alternative, so that we could offer our customers colour matched hard wearing finishes which were matched for colour. However, after a number of years of experience we have now moved away from the traditional cellulose paints and now use acrylic emulsions from Germany which are the same as those now used by the major car manufacturers but aside from this we still use the same techniqes, carefully matching the colour to account for fading and staining on the existing leather. We call this "Modern Connollising".