By B. Crawford 

What would you do if someone handed you a dead skunk? If you were Colin Wheeler at The Nugget Company, you would shrug your shoulders and give it a look. A dead skunk in the middle of the road? Maybe we can do something with it. 

Colin Wheeler and his team in San Antonio, Texas, don’t spend much time dealing with dead skunks. As America’s premier sheepskin tannery and the leading producer of fine shearling leather in the United States, The Nugget Company transforms tens of thousands of sheep hides per year into the world’s finest all-American shearling leather, or leather that retains the wool. Since its founding more than 30 years ago, The Nugget Company has established itself as the premier American shearling tannery, producing sheep and lamb shearling of unmatched quality. 

“We are a tannery that sells to other businesses,” Colin Wheeler explains. “Our customers cut up our skins and make them into retail-ready garments like footwear and vests, as well as saddle pads and other consumer products.”  

“For the most part, we do two different types of tannages,” Colin says. “We do chrome tanning of sheepskin for shearling that is used primarily in the fashion industry, sheepskin slippers, shoe linings, boot linings, vests and other items. We also do what we call vegetable tanning using a tree bark extract from South America. The veg-tanning process is a bit more environmentally friendly and it yields a slightly different, more industrial type of leather. Our main client for that is the equestrian trade, specifically saddlemakers.” Colin and his team are also working to develop other non-chrome tannages that have even less environmental impact.   

If you’ve ever made a saddle, or even ridden a horse with a western saddle, you’ve probably encountered shearling from The Nugget Company. The Nugget Company is America’s number one supplier of shearling to the American saddlemaking industry. “If you take a western saddle and turn it over, you’ll find some orange-looking wool lining the bottom of the saddle,” Colin says. “That wool goes on top of the horse blanket, which goes on top of the horse. We sell thousands of shearling skins each year to saddlemakers across the country, who use them for everything from $25,000 show saddles to working cowboy saddles.” 

“Our shearling for saddlemakers has been our most consistently selling line over the years,” explains Koren Wheeler Growcock, Colin’s sister who is in charge of international marketing at The Nugget Company. “Our all-American produced skins are perfectly suited for that market.”  

The uses for Nugget’s shearling go far beyond the saddle. Paint rollers, car seat covers, airplane cabin seat covers, coats, wherever you see shearling you probably see Nugget’s products. “Ours is an American-made product through and through,” Colin says with justifiable pride. “Our low-cost competitors just can’t compete with our quality.”  

How can Colin, Koren and their team at The Nugget Company maintain such high standards of quality? “We are unique in the sense that our operation is vertically integrated, from raw to finished product,” Colin explains. “Nobody else is able to source domestically, produce domestically, and distribute domestically and internationally in today’s challenging logistical world.” Vertical integration helps Nugget control the quality of its product from the feedlot to the feet of supermodels.  

“It’s really fascinating,” says Colin and Koren’s father Michael Wheeler, President and CEO of The Nugget Company. “We spend time with the agricultural community, people who raise sheep and lambs, and we also have to understand chemistry and creativity. We take our skins from the ground up to the world of international fashion.”  

Nugget is in continuous conversations with farmers, ranchers and suppliers. How can we make the skins better? How can we produce skins for the ever-changing fashion market? 

“The market is always shifting,” Colin says. “We have to be able to tell the farmer, ‘Hey, what’s really popular now is that skins are being used for footwear, or automotive seat covers, or aviation seat covers or whatever it may be. We try to guide the producer to achieve maximum value for the pelt.”   

“That makes the skin more valuable for the farmers as well,” Koren says, “So it’s a win-win situation.” 

Fresh animal skins are an extremely perishable product. As Colin explains, “Our crews in Colorado, work very quickly to get the skin cooled down, salted, dried and bailed. We have to be methodical in terms of what we do and how we do it. With salting and drying, a skin will have a shelf life of six to twelve months as opposed to a raw skin, which has a shelf life of just a few hours.” 

Colin and his family actually own another company in Colorado, Nugget International, which preserves the skins, supplies The Nugget Company tanning operation in San Antonio, and sells the skins worldwide. “My father is in Turkey right now meeting with clients,” Collin said when I talked with him in May 2023. 

So how did the Wheeler family come to own America’s foremost shearling tannery and an international trading company specializing in sheep skins? 

“The origin story goes back to the late 40s and early 50s,” Mike Wheeler says. “My father was a meatpacker in San Antonio at that time. He was supplying the likes of Handy Andy and Piggly Wiggly stores that no longer exist in San Antonio.” 

After Mike got out of college in the 1970s, he went to work in his father’s business. At the time, the operation was throwing away many of the sheep skins left over from the meat packing process. Mike Wheeler thought he might be able to do something with the skins and his father agreed to let him give it a try.  

Mike Wheeler developed a pulling operation, meaning that he and his crew pulled the wool off the skins, sorted the wool and sold it. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Mike decided to expand the business. He moved up to the heart of Colorado lamb and sheep country and began a sourcing operation, working closely with producers and feeders to enhance pelt values. As he was forming his new company, Mike’s father passed away. Mike named his new company Nugget International, as a tribute to his father whose family nickname was Nugget. Today, the Wheeler family and Nugget International sell skins to buyers in the United States, and overseas markets such as Turkey, China and India. 

After Colin and Koren joined the shearling operation in San Antonio, they changed the name of the company to The Nugget Company, again as a tribute to Mike Wheeler’s father who founded the business. Colin and Koren are proud of being the third generation (or maybe the fourth) to work in the ever-evolving family business.  

Today, Mike works as the president and CEO of the company, Colin is the sales manager and Koren is the director of business development. When I asked Colin and Koren about the challenges of working in a family business, they both fell silent, then broke out laughing. Yes, it is indeed a challenge, but Colin says, “It’s great because we are a tight-knit family anyway and the business is big enough, with our operation in Colorado and San Antonio, that we can get a break from each other. Like today, my father is in Turkey visiting with customers. I am in the facility most of the time, Koren works in the facility about 70 percent of the time and works from her home the other 30 percent. We do work closely together, but it’s not like we are in cubicles next to each other all day, ready to strangle each other.”  

Koren agrees. “We are spread a little bit thin, so we have to have a good idea of what each of us does. We are aware of the challenges that everyone faces.” 

Colin, who is 37 years old, is a bachelor with a girlfriend and a house full of three dogs. “It’s all about the dogs,” says Colin, who spends a good deal of time working out and running. Koren, 39, is married with two young boys. “The house is full of energy,” she says. When she isn´t working or ferrying her boys to sporting events, Koren enjoys cooking, exercising and traveling. 

“The great thing about the family business is that because the business has become international, we have had the great fortune of traveling to places together,” Koren says. “Blending fun and work has been great.”   

Tanning is a tough business. There aren’t many people looking to wake up at 5am and wrestle with heavy, raw sheep skins. Still, The Nugget Company has managed to train and retain a great workforce, many of whom have been with the company for 20 years or more. 

“Our plant manager started working here in the early 80s and worked his way up,” Koren says. “And he knows way more about the tanning process than I do. He’s basically a chemist and he’s traveled around the world with us. We are lucky and very grateful for the people who work with us.” 

  The tanning industry has undergone tremendous change over the last century. What was once a common American industry, has now largely moved overseas to take advantage of lower labor costs and less restrictive environmental regulations. Still, the Wheeler family and The Nugget Company have managed to survive and thrive despite the international competition.  

“We are an American producer, we are using American raw materials and we are processing them in the states,” Colin says. “We produce a higher quality, higher priced product. Fortunately, there are enough customers out there that will quite literally pay the price for the value of the product we provide.” 

Over the last decade, the skyrocketing cost of sourcing products from China, India and other countries, has given The Nugget Company a competitive edge.  

“People are more and more willing to pay the price for American products,” Koren says.  

“I really do think that younger consumers are a lot more mindful of where the things are coming from that they are wearing, that they are sitting on and also where their money is going,” Colin says. “I think there is a big segment of the population that says, ‘Hey, you know, what you guys do is cool and different, and I’m willing to pay for that.’” 

In addition to tanning sheep skins, The Nugget Company also does specialty tanning, mostly for hunters and taxidermists. Koren says, “Hunting is big down here in South Texas. Individuals can bring a skin to us and we will tan it. That’s a fairly new thing we have started doing in the last 10 years or so.”  

Working as specialty tanners, Koren and Colin have processed many white tail and Axis deer skins, as well as the occasional buffalo or elk skin. But there have been some surprises as well. 

As Colin recalls, “It was about 10 years ago on a Monday morning at 10am. The phone rings. Koren picks it up. There is a distraught young woman on the line almost in tears, telling us that her boyfriend has just backed his car up over her pet ferret. For a second we thought, ‘Are you messing with me?’  But sure enough, it was a real phone call.”  

Koren continues the story. “I said to the woman, ‘Well, we have never tanned a ferret skin, but I guess we can do it. Cool it down and bring it in.’ So, her boyfriend shows up about an hour later with a Styrofoam cooler and the whole ferret is in there. We thought he was only going to bring in the skin.”  

Somehow, Colin and Koren managed to tan the ferret skin.  

But the dead skunk?   

“It turns out the woman had found the skunk dead on the side of the road, stopped her car and brought it to us,” Colin recalls, shaking his head. 

“We looked at it and decided we couldn´t do anything with it,” Koren says. “It was too far gone.” 

This sort of personal interaction is one of the aspects of the tanning business that is most important to Colin Wheeler. “It’s still a personal handshake business. There’s nothing corporate about it. It’s old school. It’s all about working hard and adding value and figuring out how to mutually benefit from business relationships.”  

With the Wheeler family’s winning combination of science, creativity and good common sense, there is no doubt that The Nugget Company will continue to maintain its worldwide reputation as a state-of-the-art organization in an old-world trade.