They were looking for leather alternatives. The answer was pineapple leaves, apple peels

In 2013 when doing some freelance work, Shivani Patel bought a granulated cork sheet to make a notice board for her room. A natural material, we harvest cork from living cork oak trees, Patel wondered about the utility of the material she had bought. Was it possible to, perhaps, make wallets out of cork? “I took to the internet right away and tried looking up companies that work with cork and found that there were few companies (none in India)