We get asked this more than anything else, usually phrased very carefully, and it deserves a straight answer instead of a brochure one. A sheepskin is a hide with the fleece still attached. It comes off an animal that was raised for meat, and it comes off after that animal has already been processed. There is no version of a sheepskin that comes from a living sheep. Not ours, not anyone's.
That is the short answer. The longer one is more interesting, because what happens to the skin after that point is where the actual environmental question sits.
It starts on a hill farm
Our skins are New Zealand Merino. New Zealand runs sheep on land that is mostly too steep, too thin or too wet to put a crop on, which is why the sheep are there at all. The farm income comes from lamb and from the fleece clipped off the living animal each year. Nobody in that chain is thinking about the skin. It is the last thing dealt with and the smallest number on the page.
Mulesing has been illegal there since 2018
This is worth putting on the record, because it is usually the specific thing people are worried about when they ask where a sheepskin comes from. Mulesing means cutting skin away from a lamb's hindquarters to stop flystrike. New Zealand banned it outright under regulation 59 of the Animal Welfare (Care and Procedures) Regulations 2018, in force from 1 October that year. Not phased out, not discouraged. Illegal, including for a vet using pain relief, with fines up to NZ$5,000 for an individual and NZ$25,000 for a company.
We are not taking credit for that. It is a law, not a certificate anyone bought. But it is the baseline our skins come from, and it is a genuine difference between origins.
The part nobody photographs
Once the meat is taken, the skin goes on a pile. From there it either gets bought and tanned, or it becomes waste that somebody has to pay to get rid of.
That second outcome has been the normal one more often than you would guess. In Australia, which sits in the same corner of the world as our supply, producers spent recent years paying processors to haul skins away, and those skins went into landfill. By June 2026 a good Merino skin was worth A$30 to A$40 again, purely because buyers came back to the market. Nothing about the sheep had changed. Only whether anyone wanted the skin.
So the honest framing is not "we use a by-product, therefore we are sustainable". It is closer to this: the material already exists, in very large quantities, and the only real decision left is whether it gets used or buried.
By-product is the correct word
In American English the term is by-product, meaning something that comes out of a process incidentally while that process is busy making something else. You will also see residual product, which means the same thing and is the more common phrasing in Europe. What it is not is a co-product. That is the word for two outputs a business deliberately makes and needs both of. If every tannery closed tomorrow, New Zealand would raise the same number of sheep next year.
Ours are leftovers twice over
Here is the part that is specific to us, and we would rather you heard it from us than found it out later. We sell seconds. A second is a skin carrying a small cosmetic mark, a slightly irregular shape, or a little variation in colour or fleece against the rest of the batch. Nothing structural. The hide is as strong and the fleece as soft as a first-grade skin. It simply failed somebody's uniformity check.
Skins like that are a headache for a business selling matched sets. They are not a headache on a floor, over a chair, or under a desk, where nobody is holding your rug up against five identical ones. Buying them is the reason our prices sit where they do, and it means a skin that was already a by-product does not get written off a second time.
What a sheepskin is not
It is not shorn. Fleece clipped from a living sheep gets spun into yarn, and that is a separate product with a separate supply chain. A sheepskin keeps the fleece attached to the hide, and a hide only comes off once.
It is also not plastic, which is what the main alternative on the market is made of. Synthetic sheepskin is polyester, and polyester is oil. It sheds microplastic fibres when it is vacuumed and washed, it flattens and mats after a couple of seasons of real use, and it does not break down when it is finished. Buying a new one every two years means new oil every two years.
The number that actually matters is how long you keep it
A skin that gets shaken out, brushed occasionally, and hand washed in cool water when it needs it will still be in use in twenty years. That is the entire environmental case and it is not complicated. One skin kept for two decades beats a stack of cheap replacements, and it is not a close contest.
Cool water, no tumble dryer, nothing near a radiator. The full method is in our care guide.
If you want to see what we have, the sheepskins are here. If you would rather check us than believe us, the mulesing regulation is public and readable, and the Australian skin prices are reported by ABC Rural.