Animal rights activists may soon have a new cause to rally against – leather computers. Inclosia Solutions has developed a process called Exo Overmolding that can be used to add leather, fabrics, or metal to PC enclosures, reports CNET News.com.

Before the Exo process was developed, leather would have to be glued to a PC. The Exo process attaches the natural exteriors of leather to the plastic during an injection molding process, which prevents peeling and allows leather to be wrapped around curves and angles without leaving wrinkles. A leather-bound Hewlett-Packard handheld created by Inclosia is already on the market.

“It is permanently fused on,” said Tom Tarnowski, global marketing manager at Inclosia.

Tulip Computers has created six prototypes for leather-bound E-Go notebooks that are expected to be brought to the European market in October 2005.

Tulip was a succesful brand decades ago, selling Commodore PCs in the United States and a variety of PCs in Europe. In the late 1990s, sales began to decline. Tulip hopes that, like Apple Computer did with the original iMac in 1998, it will be able to resurrect its brand by turning the PC into a fashion statement.

Casing a notebook in leather “typically adds a couple of dollars to the cost of a housing,” said Tarnowski. This can translate to better profits. Microsoft currently offers a leather IntelliMouse that costs 20 percent more then the plastic model, although the two are electronically identical.