2020 Family Business Awards

Cortina Leathers was proud to be awarded the Business Longevity Award by Smart Business Magazine being recognized as a successful Northern Ohio business for the past 117 years. While we were not able to attend the ceremony in person we were honored to be included with a prestigious group of Ohio businesses.

Cortina Leathers was founded as Conneaut Leather in 1903 in Conneaut, Ohio, by a group of businessmen led by Charles L. Whitney, to tan and finish leather for upholstering furniture and manufacturing leather luggage.

In 1925, it closed its tannery to focus on leather finishing and in the 1940s was supplying desktop leather to the residential furniture industry.

The company expanded into manufacturing upholstery seating leathers for the automotive aftermarket, office furniture, residential furniture and aviation industries. And in the 1990s, it began stocking finished leather to make it immediately available to office furniture manufacturers, invested in stocked leather and automated cutting machines, and expanded into the automotive aftermarket, book binding and marine markets.

In 2005, Austin Capital Partners LLC bought the company, with President Jack Prause arriving in 2012 to help diversify and expand into new markets. In 2014, Conneaut Leather acquired Cortina Leathers, expanding its standard leather SKUs to over 750 and opening the door to new markets.

Today, doing business as Cortina Leathers, more than 55 employees process 9,000 hides per month, supplying multinational customers and leather for furniture used by the federal government.