This article is part of a series where we unpack what the ‘Made in the UK’ label stands for in 2025, and what it tells us about the future of onshoring. Read our series on ‘Made in Italy’ here, and ‘Made in India’ here.
Nestled in the Somerset countryside, around 40 minutes drive from the Roman spa town of Bath, sits The Rookery, one of Mulberry’s long-standing British manufacturing sites, and home to its lifetime-service centre. Along one wall is a stash of more than 2,500 variations of leather, spanning the brand’s entire 54-year history. On another, there are drawers upon drawers of spare parts, from zips and D-rings to plays on the Postman’s Lock, Mulberry’s signature hardware.
It can take years for workers to earn a spot in the lifetime-service centre. Where other production workers just have to master a single skill, they have to prove excellence across stitching, cutting and colour-matching. They need an encyclopedic knowledge of the Mulberry archive and the skills to bring even the oldest and most dishevelled of bags back to their former glory, without compromising their sentimental value. The stakes are high, in more ways than one.
The British heritage brand’s performance worsened in the first half of 2024. Andrea Baldo is confident he can get it back on track.
When Mulberry CEO Andrea Baldo joined the company from Ganni in August 2024, he was tasked with turning it around. No easy feat, given that revenue was down 19 per cent year-on-year to £56.1 million, and the brand’s underlying loss before tax had sunk to £15.3 million. Central to his turnaround strategy — dubbed ‘Back to the Mulberry Spirit’ — is long-term investment in British manufacturing, and an increasing emphasis on circularity, including both resale and repairs. “Mulberry was born in Somerset and we have a legacy here that we have invested in. To backpedal on our commitment to British manufacturing would mean diluting our brand and losing our roots,” says Baldo.
Like many British brands, Mulberry has outsourced much of its production to keep prices down while continuing to produce at scale. Today, the brand makes around 50 per cent of its staple styles in the UK, including the Bayswater and Lily bags. This is split across The Rookery and The Willows, a second Somerset site that opened in 2013.
More trend-driven designs are outsourced to leather goods suppliers in Türkiye, China and Vietnam, which are more agile and cost effective. “In order to make our UK production sites viable, they have to be efficient. If you chop and change styles every day, you undermine the viability,” says chief information and operations officer Dharmini Chauhan. She describes the brand’s international suppliers as the “Mulberry diaspora”, mirroring British manufacturing abroad. “If you think about the Mulberry tree, our roots are in the UK, but we branch out to other places. The challenge is branching out from a solid foundation, and making sure the same values apply.”
While overseas production is cheaper, Baldo says UK manufacturing is “non-negotiable” for Mulberry. He explains that the brand has justified the higher labour costs by creating a specialised workforce in the UK that is more focused on the creative side of leather goods making.
“When you have an atelier in your backyard, you can do fast prototypes, which aids development and allows you to lead with creativity,” he notes. “It’s a massive advantage and a huge value creation opportunity… I see a lot of potential for ‘Made in the UK’ to be coherent with our turnaround strategy, if we can use British manufacturing as a marketing tool that transcends operations, turning that cost into an opportunity.”
Rebranding supply chain jobs
One of the big challenges for Mulberry is securing the right talent to keep its legacy alive, says Baldo. That’s why the brand is doubling down on its apprenticeship programme, which launched in 2006, in partnership with nearby Bridgwater Taunton College. At the time, the company was facing a looming skills shortage — 50 per cent of its production staff were over the age of 50 and a further 13 per cent over the age of 65.
The most popular apprenticeship Mulberry runs is for leather craftspeople, a Level Two programme that takes 15 months to complete. “Over that time, apprentices learn how to make our products from beginning to end, including background knowledge on sustainability, the leather industry and the history of leather in the UK,” says talent and development advisor Jen Reid, who spearheads the programme. “We also try to shape them into well-rounded professionals, so we teach them soft skills like communication and presenting.”
Since the programme began, just under 220 people have joined, with 168 achieving the final qualification and 47 still working at Mulberry today. One success story is senior development centre specialist Harrison Malik, who has risen through the ranks since he started aged 16, almost 14 years ago. “Being an apprentice, I got to learn about every part of the business,” says Malik, noting how helpful it is to his current role that he understands how all the various cogs fit together. “You have to constantly ask how a bag will perform on the production line. When the design team comes up with something, we run through different constructions and different methods to make sure it will work when people are producing 80 a day. We do almost all of the development in the UK, even if the bag is being made abroad.”
Attracting national or global talent means rebranding what it means to work in the supply chain, says Chauhan. “When you think about UK manufacturing, you might have almost nostalgic thoughts of old-world working, but there is so much potential to drive efficiency and make the processes better. One of our craftspeople is putting herself through Six Sigma [a data-driven methodology used to improve business processes by minimising defects and variability] and Lean training [which aims to optimise processes, reduce waste and improve customer satisfaction],” she explains. “For us to be sustainable as a British manufacturer, we have to keep improving and innovating.”
An orchestra that can only play one note
After decades of offshoring, the British manufacturing industry is on its knees. “When you look around us, you don’t find a lot of similar companies upstream or downstream,” says Baldo. “We are living on an island, so we don’t have synergies or healthy competition. It’s a real shame, because innovation develops in clusters.”
Take British leather, for example. In theory, Mulberry would be an ideal candidate to support locally produced leather. Some 85-90 per cent of its products contain bovine leather, and Baldo has stated his intentions to invest in regenerative agriculture where possible, a sign that his past leading sustainability-centric brand Ganni will seep into his Mulberry tenure. But the brand’s three-year research and development efforts with regenerative British leather advocate British Pasture Leather has yet to bear fruit. “The challenge is that you need to create a coalition to make British leather commercially viable,” says Baldo. “You need to get the farmers on board, but you also need the hide collectors and tanneries in place, otherwise you lose the end-to-end manufacturing. There is no point using British leather if you have to tan it in Türkiye. We haven’t found the right partners to do that at our scale yet.”
What would it take to bring back production clusters to the UK and make brands like Mulberry less of an ‘island’? Baldo doesn’t mince his words: “Bring back tax-free shopping. How can brands export Britishness if we don’t allow British products to be a major reason that people come here? If we make it harder for people to buy something that is only available in the UK?”
The UK government scrapped the VAT-free shopping scheme for tourists in 2021. At the time, the Treasury said it was “a costly relief that does not benefit the whole of [Great Britain] equally”. Baldo’s predecessor, Thierry Andretta, was equally vocal about the financial challenges Mulberry faced when tax-free shopping was removed. And it isn’t the only brand: Burberry and Selfridges have also pushed for it to be reinstated, backed by London Mayor Sadiq Khan, as have the British Fashion Council and UK luxury trade body Walpole.
Before it was scrapped, tax-free shopping brought in over £9 million for Mulberry each year. Baldo says that its removal has cost Mulberry “many millions” in direct sales. The wider costs — making it even harder for British manufacturers to survive — are harder to calculate. “When you look at what is left in the UK, it’s like having an orchestra that can only play one note,” Baldo says. “We need to reactivate the cluster around leather-making so we can play seven notes. We cannot do it alone.”
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