Inside Made in Britain
Fast-fashion retailers and designers hail the success of UK factories
When Nicholas Brooke first walked into Sunspel’s 79year-old factory in Long Eaton days after he had bought the upmarket clothing brand, the roof was leaking, there was no electricity and the accounts team still wrote orders into ledger books.
Ten years on, Sunspel, which was founded in 1860, is enjoying a modern manufacturing upturn that is rooted in a “Made in Britain” revival.
Following the shock EU referendum vote, one glimmer of hope for the fashion industry was that Brexit could signal the return of the “march of the makers” once championed by former chancellor George Osborne, with the weaker pound making it more economical to bring back textile manufacturing on to these shores.
Industry experts have played down the likelihood of a return to mass-scale and volume manufacturing. However, this year cotton-spinning returned to the country for the first time in a generation. English Fine Cotton, backed by Anglo-German parent Culimeta-Saveguard, has invested £5.8m in restoring a mill in Dukinfield, Manchester, that was built in 1853 and ended production a century later.
Two hundred years ago, Manchester was known as “Cottonopolis” after spinning around 80pc of the world’s cotton but the city’s last mill shut in 1989.
Just 30 years ago, almost 1 million people were employed by the UK textile industry. But in the late 1980s and 1990s the sector suffered major cutbacks as production moved to China, Vietnam and Bangladesh where the cost of labour and raw materials was significantly cheaper. The number of people employed by the sector is now just around 105,000, according to Adam Mansell of the UK Fashion and Textile Association (UKFT).
The Alliance Report last year on the repatriation of UK Textiles Manufacturing claimed that despite competition from overseas, the industry is still worth £9bn to the economy and is experiencing both domestic and export growth. It also suggests that last year alone 5,000 jobs were created in the UK textile manufacturing sector.
Asos, Britain’s biggest online fashion retailer, unveiled plans this month to double its UK manufacturing base, citing the benefits of the post-Brexit sterling slump. Currently, just 4pc of Asos’s clothes are made in two factories in London, where it also has a sewing academy.
British online retailers can react and deliver products much quicker if they use UK factories rather than ones in Asia. Manchester-based online retailers Boohoo, Missguided and Pretty Little Thing and online fashion start-up Silk Fred are part of a growing club of fast-fashion companies that rely on British designers and manufacturers to quickly fulfil twentysomethings’ desires to buy outfits for that Friday night out.
“We are proud to source over 50pc of our products from the UK,” Boohoo co-chief executive and founder Carol Kane told The Daily Telegraph. “Having our suppliers nearby allows us to lead the way in offering the very latest trends and styles.”
Mansell of UKFT added that another obvious advantage for a retailer with a UK factory was the “ability to jump in the car and speak to a supplier face-toface if something is not right”.
One of Jigsaw’s biggest sellers this winter has been a £39 woolly, knitted pom-pom hat made with Irish wool in a Scottish factory. Peter Ruis, Jigsaw chief executive, said that the company had recently taken delivery for another 20,000 of the best-seller. “We’ve been able to have a four-week turnaround rather than four months because we have been manufacturing here,” said Ruis.
The upmarket fashion chain also launched a mini-collection of knitwear this year under a Native Shetland brand which used fleece from purebred Shetland sheep, with the whole process undertaken by experts in Britain. “We only made around 100 knitwear pieces and they were sold at around £200, so they were more expensive than our usual jumpers,” added Ruis.
Despite Ruis’s efforts only 3pc or 4pc of Jigsaw’s ranges are made in Britain. “There is a lot of doom and gloom around but we should celebrate what British manufacturing is good at, which is at the top end of the market.
“We need to celebrate the artisan quality and maybe it is better that our factories become experts at the artisan approach, rather than killing themselves by running around to make millions of tops at a low-margin for the high street,” he added.
One obvious hurdle for a “made in Britain” revival is that it relies on a consumer willing to pay more. For example, Dr. Martens, the maker of boots beloved by punks and grungers, moved manufacturing to Asia in 2003 with the loss of 1,000 jobs. Steve Murray, chief executive, revealed that while the company now sells 6 million boots, only 60,000 are part of its Made in England range. That’s partly because demand is limited due to price. A pair of its eight-hole boots made in Yorkshire cost £195 compared with £105 for standard issue.
As a result of the higher costs involved, British manufacturing lends itself to the luxury sector, where shoppers are already willing to spend thousands of pounds on designer items. Luxury handbag maker Mulberry employs a team of 750 craftsmen in Somerset which makes 60pc of its leather products.
Meanwhile, Burberry, which makes its trench coats in Castleford, West Yorkshire, announced in 2015 that it would invest £50m in a new facility in Leeds. However, it has “paused” these plans following the Brexit vote. The delay is a sign of how uncertainty about Britain extricating itself from the EU has dented confidence.
Another major headache for the UK’s textile industry is that it mainly relies on eastern European workers who could be deterred from entering Britain if there is a clampdown on the movement of peoples.
“The vast majority of sewing machinists in UK factories are from Eastern Europe, where sewing skills are still taught in schools,” said the UKFT’s Mansell.
However, he is confident there will still be a revival of British manufacturing: “I think that there is a small, but significant and growing part of the population that wants to know where their clothes come from and buy into the sense of heritage and story of their clothes.”
‘I think that there is a small but growing part of the population that wants to buy into the sense of heritage’