By the time she was 12, Christy Plott Redd was hanging up tanned alligator skins at trade show booths with her father in Hong Kong. Now, the family business has grown even more global, requiring the red-haired Georgia girl now known as the “Alligator Queen” to be just as at home in the high fashion houses of Europe as she is in the bayous of Louisiana.
American Tanning and Leather Co. is one of the only American tanneries focused on alligator and other exotic leathers. Tucked behind a housing project in an old vegetable factory on Pimento Road in Griffin, Ga., the company takes hides on a seven-month metamorphosis into high-end materials used in handbags, shoes and garments displayed on the runways of Milan and Paris and sold in the luxury boutiques of Beijing and Moscow.
Ms. Redd, who owns part of the company along with her brothers, Damon and Chandler Plott, says the process of turning more than 20,000 skins per year into American-made leather requires both mechanical precision and personal touch.
Once the skins arrive – rolled, salted and smelling like seafood – they’re put through a multistep process that can render them in 60-plus colors and even more finishes. A paddle drum removes the scales before the skin goes into another large round tanning machine that treats it with the chemical chrome to render it in a “wet blue” state. Then the skins are tacked to boards by hand and dried in a white “crust” form to await dyeing and finishing, a process that calls for meticulous hand work with a mechanical polisher.
“It’s a perfect blend of art and chemistry, and if you have one and not the other you don’t have a good product,” Ms. Redd told Global Atlanta during an interview in at a conference room table graced by a giant alligator skull.
Ms. Redd and her team check the skins and assign each a grade. Her exacting nature reflects the relational aspect of the relatively close-knit tanning community globally, where respect comes from a blend of staying power, product quality and industry knowledge.
“Everything in business I think is built on relationships, and the biggest misconception people have is that it’s so, so formal. It’s just people trying to make a living and feed their families, whether it’s Hermes or LVMH,” Ms. Redd said, noting that the family has hosted Ralph Lauren buyers at its family farm between Columbus and Albany.
American Tanning works through a “handshake agreement” with its Italian partner, which buys and warehouses many of its skins for European producers. “We might’ve written something down on a napkin one time,” she says. The team of brothers running that Milan-based company, Whiteline, calls her “sorellina,” or “little sister.” In Japan, her closest partner is another leather heiress whose father began trading with hers in the 1960s.
You could say skin was in the blood of the University of Georgia graduate, who also earned her MBA at Wesleyan College in Macon. The Plott family had been in the fur business for three generations before her father got a deal on 12,000 alligator skins he couldn’t pass up. He tanned the first one in 1981, refining the process over time as he traveled the world and welcomed technical advisers from places like Italy and Singapore to a guest house built onto their Griffin home expressly for that purpose.
“I think I could count to 10 in every language by the time I was 6 or 7,” she said.
Ms. Redd remembers working at the tannery in the summers, calling the operator to find out how to process faxes to Papua New Guinea and Malaysia. Fur sales subsidized the leather business at the outset, but now the company focuses exclusively on alligator hides.
Chris Plott, Ms. Redd’s father, is still integrally involved in the business, especially at this time of year. It’s wild alligator season in Louisiana, a nearly two-month period where fisherman are allowed to catch up to their limit in government-issued tags. Usually around 35,000 tags are issued to licensed landowners under a program designed to preserve the once-endangered species.
The tags, issued under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, or CITES, mark the skins from the time they’re pulled out of the water until they reach the end buyer, wherever in the world that may be. “It’s kind of like their passport,” Ms. Redd says, noting that U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service inspectors have to approve each shipment before it heads abroad.
“From the time it’s an alligator till the time it’s a finished skin, that alligator has an identity,” says Damon Plott, who recently returned from American Tanning’s facility in Louisiana, where the company buys and processes whole alligators from fisherman. Only one-third of American Tanning’s skins come from the wild, but the open season is important because it’s a chance to capture big animals that can’t be raised at commercial farms.
Ms. Redd, who is fluent in Spanish, conversational in Chinese and now is working on Italian, handles all international sales for the company, which account for about 70 percent of overall revenues.
Exports, she said, aren’t just for multinationals. Small companies just have to attend industry trade shows and use whatever assistance they can find.
“You don’t just pack up and go out and knock on people’s doors,” she said.
The Southern United States Trade Association’s MAP Brand program, geared toward U.S. agricultural exporters, has been particularly useful. It reimburses companies for up to 50 percent of qualified expenses incurred from trade show attendance and can be used for five years in each market. Ms. Redd has used the program in Italy, France and Hong Kong. Dubai is on her travel docket for 2015.
In the cash-intensive business, where value is tied up in the hides until they can be sold, financing can be an obstacle, but American Tanning’s product is so rare that it can often require cash from buyers up front instead of dealing with letters of credit and other export-finance instruments.
American Tanning needs to hire about 10 people, but finding workers can be a challenge. Most of its tannery employees are immigrants from Mexico and other Latin American countries, some of whom have gained their citizenship while working for the company.
Ms. Redd and the company itself have come a long way from those first trade shows.
“Thinking back on it, I think it’s pretty hysterical that I can imagine myself 12 years old offering coffee to Chinese people in my little Sunday dress.”
Visit www.amtan.com for more information about the company.