Kova Studio and the vegetable-tanned sneaker

Kova makes the Court 01 from leather tanned with bark rather than chrome salts.

Vegetable tanning takes weeks instead of days and yields a firmer leather that marks easily at first and then evens out into a patina.

The trade-off is water. Chrome-tanned leather shrugs off rain; vegetable-tanned leather stains until the finish builds up. Kova ships a wax sample with every pair for that reason.

After a year the white pair is not white. That is the point, and the product page says so plainly.