中文A Leather Chemicals CEO Arrives With an Archroma CV. That Is the Point.
Stephan Sielaff took over as chief executive of the Schill+Seilacher Group on 1 October 2026, as the specialty chemicals company begins what it calls its next phase of development. The appointment deserves more attention from the leather trade than a routine leadership change normally would, because of where he came from and what he inherits.
Sielaff is a chemical engineer with around 30 years of experience in specialty chemicals and related industries. His career has included senior roles at Unilever, Symrise, Archroma and Lenzing AG, and most recently he served as chief executive of SSI SCHÄFER Plastics.
Archroma is the detail that matters. It is one of the largest suppliers of leather chemicals in the world, and it is where a generation of this industry’s process expertise was formed. A chief executive arriving at a leather auxiliaries house with that background is not a generic chemicals appointment.
The inheritance is difficult
Sielaff takes over at a genuinely testing moment for Europe’s chemical industry. International competitive pressure, rising costs and weak industrial demand are all bearing down on the sector simultaneously.
None of those pressures is abstract at the tannery gate.
Energy costs in Europe remain structurally higher than in Asia or North America, and leather chemicals are not a low-energy business — fatliquors, syntans, retanning agents and finishing products all involve energy-intensive synthesis and solvent handling. International competitive pressure means a European tanner can buy an equivalent product from an Asian supplier at a landed price that European producers struggle to match. Weak industrial demand means the tanners themselves are running below capacity, and every tonne of leather not made is a quantity of chemicals not consumed.
That combination produces a predictable industry response: consolidation, portfolio pruning, and a retreat to products where technical service and regulatory documentation justify a price premium. Schill+Seilacher’s exposure to leather sits alongside its other specialty lines, and the strategic question for any new chief executive is whether leather is a core to invest in or a category to manage for cash.
His stated answer
Sielaff’s own framing is more interesting than the standard incoming-CEO language. He argues the response should go beyond cost reduction, with greater customer proximity, operational excellence, international collaboration and successful commercialisation of innovation becoming increasingly important.
“European specialty chemicals continue to have strong prospects. But we need to move faster, work more closely with our customers and make better use of our strengths internationally,” he said.
That is a coherent position, and it is the right one for a company in his position. Cost reduction alone is a losing strategy for a European specialty chemical producer — you cannot out-cost an Asian plant from a site in Germany. What you can do is sell a formulation plus a service, where the price reflects the problem solved rather than the drum of product shipped.
He aims to strengthen collaboration across Schill+Seilacher’s international locations and business areas, connecting expertise, technologies and market knowledge more effectively. That sounds like management-speak, but in this industry it has a specific meaning: a tanner in Bangladesh or Ethiopia needs a technical service team that can reach the drum within days, not a quarterly visit from a European application lab.
Why tanners should care
Three practical implications follow.
The first is continuity of technical support. Leather chemicals are sold as systems, not commodities. A retanning regime is tuned to a specific hide source, drum, water hardness and final article. If a supplier loses application chemists in a restructuring, the tanner absorbs the disruption — batches go out of specification and nobody can explain why. Any leadership change at a major auxiliaries supplier is a moment for tanners to check that their technical contact is still in place.
The second is pricing direction. A chief executive hired to deliver commercialisation of innovation and customer proximity is not going to compete on price. Expect the portfolio to be reweighted toward higher-value, service-intensive products, and expect commodity lines to be rationalised, outsourced or quietly discontinued. Tanners running standard formulations should model a price increase on the commodity end and a stronger offer on the specialty end.
The third is consolidation risk. Europe’s chemical industry is contracting, and the leather chemicals segment within it is contracting faster because the tanneries it serves are closing. A new chief executive with a mandate to focus will, sooner or later, look at the portfolio and ask which lines earn their capital. Tanners dependent on a single supplier for a critical product should know what their second source is — and should have a trial batch behind them, not just a name on a list.
The test ahead
The appointment will be judged on three things over the next two years: whether the leather business gains technical share in Asia and Africa, whether it holds price in Europe without losing volume, and whether it finds a defensible position in the industry’s tightening chemical compliance regime.
That last one may be the real opportunity. As restricted-substance lists expand and buyers demand documented compliance at batch level, the supplier who can hand a tanner a complete, auditable, regulation-ready dossier becomes far more valuable than the one who simply quotes a lower price per kilo. Selling compliance is a better business than selling chemistry.
Sielaff has spent thirty years learning that. The leather trade will find out over the next four quarters whether he can execute it.
Source: Leather News (leathernews.org), reporting the appointment of Stephan Sielaff as CEO of Schill+Seilacher Group
