KURK FAQ
Is my CORKS handbag water resistant?
Yes! You can rest easy. The best kept secret of cork is that it is completely water resistant. Cork gets old without getting bad because it is resistant to moisture. Your bag can withstand moisture and a heavy downpour.
Is CORK strong?
Thanks to the honeycomb structure of the cork cells, they are resistant to wear and have a high coefficient of friction. It's not for nothing that cork is used as material at NASA.
Your CORKS handbag is resistant to rubbing, tearing, scratching and stains.
How should I maintain my CORK HANDBAG?
Good news! You have no maintenance on a cork handbag. She doesn't need to be injected or treated. Pure nature.
Occasionally wipe clean with a damp cloth is more than enough. Do you have a speck on your cork handbag? Lukewarm water, a drop of detergent and a microfibre cloth suffice.
How is cork extracted?
A cork tree takes about 25 years to mature, then it's ready for 'Virgin' or his first 'harvest'.
The bark of the tree is carefully peeled manually by high skilled labor workers who pass on the stiel from generation to generation.
No machine in the world can take over this precision work, it is important that the underlying structures of the bark are not damaged. A damaged bark won't give a cork anymore.
The bark regenerates after harvest and is ready for a new harvest after an average of 8 years.
Harvesting cork trees is a wonderful example of a perfect balance between man and nature. After all, a peeled tree converts 3 to 5 times more CO2 to oxygen and lives on average 20% longer.
What are the special properties of cork?
Cork is completely natural and is 'tanned' with water. Because it is easily and naturally processed, the products retain all the qualities for which 'raw' cork is known:
➡️Light as a feather: This is a huge advantage of cork because let's face it, no one likes to carry a laptop bag that is heavier than the laptop itself. The volume of cork is 50 percent air, no wonder it's featherlight.
➡️Water resistant: The best kept secret of cork is that it is completely water resistant. Cork gets old without getting bad because it is resistant to moisture. A waxy layer in the cell walls makes cork impermeable for liquids and gases.
➡️File against rubbing, scratching and tearing:
Thanks to the honeycomb structure of the cork cells, they are resistant to wear and have a high coefficient of friction. It's not for nothing that cork is used as a material at NASA
➡️Soft and unique: The softness of kurkleder is a delicious feature. In addition, each piece of cork is as unique as a fingerprint. After all, you can never have the same piece of bark twice.
What is cork used most?
Since Dom Perignon 'bottled' his first champagne bottle with a cork stop in the 17th century, cork has been an important export for the wine and Champagne industry around the world for centuries.
In the last decade, bottles have been fitted with synthetic turning plugs more often because they are much cheaper in production and as raw materials.
It was the first time the cork industry had taken a beating. And as we learned in 2020 'never washed a good crisis'. People became inventive with 'their cork': building materials, fashion items, shoes,...
Why is it such an environmentally friendly product?
Cork goes a lot further in ecological sustainability. It is a natural product from a renewable source. No tree should be felled or damaged.
There are no chemicals or additives involved.
More so the peeling of the trees contributes to our ecology. Peeled trees convert more CO2 to oxygen and a cork forest is good for converting 10 million tons of C02 to oxygen.
Biologists talk about the Amazon forest of Europe
➡️The cork forests provide an unseen and unique ecosystem with enormous biodiversity.
➡️ Cork trees ensure the preservation of the fragile soil and the retention of precious and scarce groundwater.
Without cork trees, the landscape would very quickly turn into wastelands. Dry, arid and impossible to grow anything. These tracts of land would become uninhabitable for humans and animals would move away en masse. The local fauna and flora would soon disappear to never return.
➡️Kurk forests support the greatest biodiversity in Europe and provide an ancient and precious landscape, but also protect many endangered species.
Why is CORK Fair trade?
Cork farmers are the highest paid workers in Europe. Their work is of such great national and ecological importance that they are well insured and provided at all levels.
The cork farmers have to relax to do their job as well as possible. They are paid not according to the amount of cork they produce, but based on the hours of labor they perform. In this way, the government wants to monitor the quality of the extraction process, so that the health of the trees is protected at all times.
How does the production process go, what goes with that?
After the cork is meticulously peeled off the trees by hand, everything dries in the open air for six months.
Then the cork is cooked and steamed to gain more elasticity. Heat and pressure is applied to the cork to squeeze it into smaller blocks, and later cut into thinner layers to process into cork products.
Kurkleder is incredibly soft and flexible and behaves like the finest and most expensive leather goods. In specialized workshops, my designs are sewn by hand into quality lifestyle products.