Can British Brand Peregrine Offer a Blueprint for Place-Based Fashion?

“This is 1.1 kilos of pure wool,” says Peregrine Clothing managing director Tom Glover as he drops a chunky, cable-knit fisherman’s jumper onto the desk in front of me. “It’s like the Rolls-Royce of jumpers. You couldn’t have this made cheaper offshore, not at this quality.”

We’re sitting in the British brand’s head office in Bristol. The jumper in question is a bestseller that encapsulates Peregrine’s ethos: it was made in the brand’s Manchester factory from 100% British wool; the farms and spinners all within a 300-mile radius. It’s not the softest fiber, but its texture has character in spades.

A few years ago, British wool was making headlines for all the wrong reasons: prices had fallen so low that some farmers were burning fleeces because it cost more to shear a sheep than what the fiber was worth. Since then, a quiet but determined movement has begun to pull the material back into relevance, especially in outerwear and men’s.

“What I like about British wool is that kind of melange-y [mixed fiber], authentic handle,” explains Glover. “It’s not a flat dye. I think that’s what separates British knitwear to, say, an Italian knit where the color is perfectly uniform. With British yarns, it’s more earthy. That’s what we sell ourselves on: personality and character.”

Tom Glover.

Photo: Courtesy of Peregrine

Though the Peregrine label itself is relatively modern, it sits atop a family manufacturing business that began in 1796 (Tom is the eighth generation Glover to take the helm). With more than 220 stockists worldwide — from Selfridges in London to Le Bon Marché in Paris and Japanese retail chain Beams — the brand has gained a reputation for its quintessentially British knitwear and wax jackets, and for keeping production in the UK.

I first met Glover in October at a breakfast celebrating 15 years of Campaign for Wool, an initiative started by King Charles III (when he was the Prince of Wales) to educate consumers about the benefits of wool. There, campaign chair Peter Ackroyd spoke about a “welcome and long-awaited” surge in wool demand — a sentiment validated weeks later, when auction prices for British wool hit a nine-year high. This week, the industry is gathering for the second annual Wool Exchange, an event convened by Central Saint Martins and British Wool, the latter an organization that collects, grades and sells wool on behalf of over 30,000 UK sheep farmers (Peregrine is a British Wool licensee).

The renewed focus on locally sourced wool dovetails with a growing conversation in sustainability circles around place-based fashion — the idea that brands should work with the fibers, skills and landscapes of their immediate environment, rather than relying on globalized, extractive supply chains. For many, this represents fashion’s next frontier: a way to cut carbon and restore local ecosystems.

Peregrine AW25.

Photos: Courtesy of Peregrine/ Ciaran Spencer

Glover’s commitment to manufacturing in the UK, and using British materials where the infrastructure allows, places Peregrine at the center of this shifting landscape. Yet, the practical reality is far more complex. Producing in this way is more expensive and often incompatible with the margins and growth expectations of mainstream fashion. The brands pushing it forward tend to be led by those, like Glover, who believe in the principle, and accept the commercial constraints that come with it.

“I make it in the UK because it makes sense,” he says. “People need to be employed in the UK. We have a lower carbon footprint because our clothes aren’t traveling all around the world. We can get things made within 60 miles — from sheep to mill to factory — which I think is amazing, and it’s how it should be. You can also make better product when it’s on your doorstep, because you can control the manufacturing.”

The unexpected face of Google Gemini

Even if you haven’t heard of Peregrine, or seen its signature Bexley wax jacket on the likes of Glen Powell or Tom Hardy, you may still recognize its owner. While Glover is not one to seek out the limelight, earlier this year, he agreed to be filmed in the factory for a Google Gemini campaign. As a result, he and Peregrine featured in a social media ad for the AI assistant, as well as on several large Gemini billboards throughout the UK in October and early November.

There’s an almost comical juxtaposition between AI and a business that stands for preserving heritage craftsmanship. But Glover saw it for the brand exposure opportunity that it was, rather than a commentary on an AI-driven future, he clarifies. In fact, Glover is ambivalent about AI: it’s useful for writing emails and speeding up admin, but in his view, it’s not going to solve any of the challenges facing manufacturers. (He’d rather have a new knitting machine.)

The Google Gemini campaign ran throughout October and early November.

Photo: Jim Winslet

Beneath that unusually high-profile moment sits a much more grounded story. The business started when Glover’s ancestor (also called Thomas Glover) began selling jumpers made on hand-frame knitting machines, based near Leicester. By 1901, it had been incorporated as a manufacturer called J G Glover Co (after John George Glover, the fifth generation owner). Over the years, the company expanded to eventually employ 300 people, but contracted again when British retailers began offshoring production in the 1980s. The Peregrine brand was introduced by Donald Glover (Tom’s grandfather) in 1956.

The bulk of the business was sold in 1987, though Glover’s father continued to produce for other retailers. When Glover graduated with a degree in product design in 2003, he decided to revive the Peregrine brand. In the early days, he was selling jumpers out of the back of his car at rural equestrian events; a decade later, in 2012, he and business partner Surinder Gupta bought the Manchester factory that now underpins its production — making under the J G Glover Co name. Today, Peregrine has a £3.6 million turnover; currently 90% is from menswear, the rest from womenswear.

Peregrine’s Manchester factory is co-owned by Tom Glover and his business partner Surinder Gupta.

Photos: Courtesy of Peregrine

The business has effectively been rebuilt from scratch, but it is anchored in a lineage Glover absorbed growing up in Leicester as the local textile industry was collapsing. This fueled his commitment to making in the UK. “The more I worked with people, the more I understood what was being lost — and the more passionate I became about the made in England side of it,” he recalls. Some 97% of its offer is made in England. The one thing he can’t make here is cotton shirts, which are produced in Spain, near where the fabric is sourced in Portugal. (The UK no longer has the shirt-making capability, he explains; but even if it did, Brexit has made importing that fabric too costly.)

Navigating ‘Made in the UK’ realities

Peregrine has stockists in 22 countries worldwide. Outside of the UK, the US and Germany are vying for the position of its biggest market; there’s also strong demand from customers in Scandinavia, South Korea and Japan. Earlier this year, the brand won a King’s Award for Enterprise, after growing its exports by around 27% over three years — it will be presented in the coming weeks. But international growth has not been easy.

At times, it can feel as if the odds are stacked against the British brands determined to continue exporting. After the disruption of Brexit, the Trump-era import tariffs added another layer of friction to US trade. Glover chose to absorb the extra costs rather than pass them on to customers, a decision that squeezed margins even tighter. “We’re a relatively small brand, and we’re competing against the big guys,” he says. “When you’re going into a retailer like Nordstrom, if you make it complicated for them, they’re just going to say, ‘We’ll go somewhere else.’ So we stomached [the tariffs] this year.”

The unpredictability of wholesale is another ongoing challenge. “We wrote an order from one customer for £80,000, which is great. Ten of those and suddenly you have a very nice business. But that £80,000 order could disappear, or turn into £200,000. So it’s hard to strategize.” Direct-to-consumer (DTC) offers more certainty. Over the past three years, Peregrine has grown DTC from 10% to 30% of revenue. But the channel cannot replace wholesale, because the factory depends on consistent volume. “We can’t just rely on e-commerce; it’s still quite seasonal,” Glover explains.

His ideal wholesale network is curated and intentional: “What you look for in a wholesale partner, to me, is financial security, and someone who can represent your brand in a nice way and tell that story to their community.” In an ideal world, he says, “I’d probably have 80 stockists, handpicking the best ones.”

Building a modern textile ecosystem

For Peregrine, the next chapter will hinge on carving out an even clearer position in the menswear landscape, where appreciation for provenance and natural fibers is steadily rising. The brand’s marketing leans into this, foregrounding local manufacturing, traceable materials and craftsmanship. This is reinforced by behind-the-scenes factory photography and worker profiles, placing the emphasis on the people behind the product.

Inheriting an eighth-generation business carries a particular kind of gravity. Glover speaks about the responsibility of being an employer, of keeping British manufacturing alive when the economics rarely stack up, and of honoring a lineage while running a viable modern company. That invisible pressure shapes nearly every decision.

A case in point: the brand has been gradually increasing the share of regeneratively farmed British wool in its collections over the past five years, working with a farmer in Kent who has 5,000 Romney sheep. A fully regenerative collection would make for a better marketing story, Glover acknowledges, but it would be commercially unworkable. “To use 100% regeneratively farmed Romney wool, we’d have to clean the whole factory down.” This, he says, is where the industry has fallen short in the past: making made in England capsule collections that are not viable at scale. “You’ve had this nice PR story, but you haven’t actually backed English manufacturing.”

Peregrine AW25.

Photo: Courtesy of Peregrine

Building relationships with farmers who are moving in the direction of regenerative farming will be a focus for the brand in 2026. “We’re very aware of the role we have to play in that transition, and we’re trying to learn how we can be helpful and supportive as the industry evolves,” says Glover.

The need to back UK manufacturing with commercially viable volumes is also where government support — or the lack of it — becomes a decisive factor. What’s missing, Glover says, is targeted investment in the infrastructure required to rebuild a functioning, contemporary textile ecosystem. He imagines a more interventionist model: the government co-investing in vertical factories and backing large-scale processing facilities so raw materials (like wool) can move through the supply chain at higher volumes. “It doesn’t need to be a cottage industry,” he insists. “It can be profitable again, with the right support.”