Naugahyde
brand and type of artificial leather
Naugahyde is an American brand of artificial leather. Naugahyde is a composite knit fabric backing an expanded polyvinyl chloride (PVC) coating. It was developed by Byron A. Hunter, a senior chemist at the United States Rubber Company, and is now manufactured and sold by the corporate spin-off Uniroyal Engineered Products LLC.
Its name, first used as a trademark in 1936, comes from the name of Naugatuck, Connecticut, where it was first produced. It is now manufactured in Stoughton, Wisconsin.
Uses
The primary use for Naugahyde is as a substitute for leather in upholstery. In this application it is very durable and can be easily maintained by wiping with a damp sponge or cloth. Being a synthetic product, it is supplied in long rolls, allowing large sections of furniture to be covered seamlessly, unlike animal hides.
General Motors for several decades used the material in several of its vehicles, with the term "Cordaveen" and later "Madrid-grain vinyl" for Buick, "Morocceen" for Oldsmobile, and "Morrokide" for Pontiac vehicles, while Chevrolet did not use a brand name and simply listed it in sales brochures as "vinyl interior".
Marketing
A marketing campaign of the 1960s and 1970s asserted facetiously that Naugahyde was obtained from the skin of an animal called a "Nauga". The claim became an urban myth.
The public source identifies “Naugahyde” as brand and type of artificial leather. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Naugahyde, brand and type.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q13548323. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1936.
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This entry incorporates text from “Naugahyde” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.