This article is part of a new 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.
In 2012, British charity Heritage Crafts was involved in a research project mapping traditional crafts such as lace making, beadworking, silk weaving and millinery. They found a 210,000-strong workforce generating £4.4 billion gross value added to the economy per year in England alone. “On the surface, it seemed like a healthy industry,” says Heritage Crafts executive director and co-founder Daniel Carpenter.
However, Heritage Crafts quickly realised that underlying those figures were serious issues: a lot of the practitioners were approaching retirement age, or were already beyond it. The vast majority were sole traders or micro-businesses, which had made no provisions for passing their skills onto the next generation. “Once these skills are lost, it’s very hard to bring them back,” says Carpenter.
This realisation led to the development of The Red List, which spotlights endangered, critically endangered and extinct skills across the UK, many of which touch the fashion and textiles supply chain. Next month, Heritage Crafts will publish the fifth edition of the list. Among the new additions is beetled linen, a method steeped in Northern Irish heritage, which dates back to the 17th century. The process involves dampening linen before pounding it with wooden blocks known as “beetles”. It was originally designed to strengthen linen, making it more durable for workwear, and flattening it for use in suit linings. Now, there’s only one beetled linen manufacturer left.
As the race to develop localised, regenerative and traceable supply chains heats up, British wool and leather have emerged as important test cases. Can the industry overcome the barriers to scale?
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Many of the crafts on the list share the same challenges: engaging the next generation of artisans, justifying their premium prices to brands that are used to working with mass manufacturers in low-wage countries, and finding new ways to reach consumers. “If any of these companies go bust, we could lose half the workforce of a given craft in one go,” says Carpenter, arguing that this could have a knock-on impact for the wider fashion industry. “People think we’re just preserving historical crafts, but it’s also about the future. If fashion is all about innovation, it needs this body of skills as a starting point.”
For the growing number of ‘Made in the UK’ brands, these crafts are essential parts of the value chain that allow them to create end-to-end British garments. It’s also a matter of national pride, says Ruth Alice Rands, founder of British knitwear brand Herd. “Within living memory, respect for British manufacturing was really high. We need to support these niche industries, and nurture the knowledge and skill it takes to be part of them.”
Vogue Business travelled around the UK to find out how craftspeople are attempting to keep some of these endangered skills alive.
Beetled linen: William Clark Sons
In December, Londonderry-based William Clark Sons, the last known beetled linen manufacturer globally, filed for insolvency after nearly 300 years in business. Brothers Gareth and Andrew Wilson quickly stepped in to buy its assets and intellectual property, despite knowing next to nothing about the process or how to make it profitable. Their company, Wilson Agri, was the first importer of cow mattresses into Europe — a specialist product used on dairy farms to provide cows with increased levels of comfort as they rest, which relies on beetled linen for its durability and lustre. “We couldn’t risk the technique ceasing to exist,” says Gareth.
The beetling mill has fallen into a state of disrepair, following decades of declining sales in the face of offshoring and the rise of fast fashion. Part of the roof came loose in a recent storm, and the remainder will require replacing soon. One of the motors also shut down this year, halting production while it was fixed. At present, the mill — which sits in a sleepy Northern Irish town called Upperlands — has three beetling machines running, while another 14 lie dormant, waiting for repairs and spare parts, which require rare specialists to make them. “We’re going to have to bring back a number of old skills to build parts,” says Andrew. The Wilsons are funding the work themselves.
William Clark Sons can make around 8,000 metres of beetled linen per month. Its growth will have to be slow. “If there was a huge uptick in demand for beetled linen tomorrow, people wouldn’t just be able to buy it,” says Andrew. “We can’t run the factory after hours because it is so noisy and the villagers will crack up, so our capacity is limited by what we can do Monday to Friday between 9am and 5pm.”
Today, the beetling mill is manned by a single worker in his late 50s, with no apprentice lined up. Attracting young talent to a noisy and physically demanding job that requires working alone in rural Northern Ireland is a challenge, says Andrew, but he remains hopeful. “There is something really rewarding about a physical job, where you can see everything you achieved at the end of the day, and you can see that it matters. We’re hoping to get someone on board with the uniqueness of it, to get them enthused about the story of beetled linen and the chance to take ownership of the trade.”
Overseeing the apprentice search — as well as the broader restoration — is general manager Kevin Devlin, who remained with the company as it changed hands. Devlin has his sights set on getting fashion brand buy-in, building on a one-off collaboration with Alexander McQueen for Spring/Summer 2020, which pushed the in-house team to improve and develop the fabric. Today, local brand Kindred of Ireland, founded by Amy Anderson and her husband Joel, is leading the charge, mixing beetled linen with metallic dyes to make luxury linen dresses, and putting the process front and centre of their brand storytelling. “We’re only just scratching the surface of how beetled linen could be used,” says Devlin.
Fabric pleating: Ciment Pleating
This year, Ciment Pleating will celebrate its 100th anniversary, but for the past five years, its specialism — fabric pleating — has been on The Red List. It is now considered critically endangered, meaning there are less than five people in the UK still practising it full-time. “There are maybe one or two other companies in the world that can do what we do,” says managing director Matt Weinert, who inherited the Potters Bar-based business from his father and grandfather (the latter of whom became its third owner in 1977). As for competitors, Weinert points to Atelier Lognon in Paris (which supplies Chanel and was incorporated into the Lemarié crafts group in 2013) and Tom’s Sons International Pleating in New York (another family-run business dating back to 1931).
Like many suppliers, Ciment Pleating has had an outsized impact on the fashion industry. Despite being well known by insiders, it doesn’t enjoy the same household status as the brands it works for. Among them are Burberry, Alexander McQueen, Phoebe Philo, Victoria Beckham and Jenny Packham. Larger brands might bring in more substantial orders, but emerging talents can be just as supportive. At London Fashion Week in February, Ciment Pleating was featured in upcycling brand ELV Denim’s debut presentation, a celebration of circular fashion that highlighted the suppliers behind the scenes. Petit Pli, a pleated childrenswear brand that “grows” with the wearer, has become one of Ciment Pleating’s most consistent customers; Weinert invested in the brand after supporting founder Ryan Mario Yasin to figure out the pleating technology before launch.
Over coffee, Weinert and I leaf through a scrapbook of Ciment Pleating’s most prolific work. It’s a ‘who’s who’ of cultural icons, spanning from Marilyn Monroe and Lady Gaga to Queen Elizabeth II and Professor McGonagall from the Harry Potter franchise. Olympic figure skaters Torvill and Dean wore Ciment Pleating for their gold medal-winning performance at the Sarajevo 1984 Winter Olympics. And earlier this year, Ciment Pleating saw its work spotlighted at the Oscars, when Wicked — which brought in around £80,000 of business for the factory — won the gong for Best Costume Design (pleating was used across multiple costumes).
Fashion and film typically make up the bulk of orders, but both can be unpredictable and fickle. “The pandemic killed two of our biggest fashion clients — Ralph Russo and Peter Pilotto — which was a third of our turnover. We went from turning over £20,000 a month to £1,500 in the first month of the pandemic. We only survived because the government paid the wages,” says Weinert. “After the pandemic, we picked up the costumes for Star Wars and Wicked, so it was about 50 per cent film and 50 per cent fashion. Then, actors went on strike in 2023 and our costume work disappeared.”
In a bid to build its customer base, Ciment Pleating has started running open days for luxury brands, where design teams are invited in to road test the service. “They can bring whatever they want and we’ll pleat it for free,” says Weinert. The initiative is already proving fruitful. “When Burberry came in, we did £1,000 of work for them for free that first day, but then everything they pleated for the next six months came to us. Then, we did the same for Alexander McQueen. Because those two are trendsetters in the UK, it’s starting to filter through to other people thinking pleating is a good idea too.”
Beyond drumming up consistent orders, the main challenge is managing capacity. It’s not uncommon for brands to request two-hour turnaround times or 100 metres of pleating in one day. To keep up, and to counter Made in the UK’s ageing workforce, Weinert has been forging close connections with fashion schools, delivering lectures to fashion students and advertising jobs to recent graduates. His team is young by industry standards. Jo, who makes the more intricate hand patterns, was hired as a graduate and has been with the company for nine years now. “She’s better at pleating than me,” says Weinert.
Vegetable tanning: Billy Tannery
In the Leicestershire countryside, on an unassuming family farm, sits Billy Tannery, the first new leather tannery to be built in the UK for nearly 100 years, established by former marketing professional Jack Millington in 2016. Billy Tannery produces vegetable crusts, the name given to vegetable-tanned leather hides, which have been dried out, ready to be sent to local specialists for dyeing and finishing.
To say Billy Tannery is a niche, artisanal operation is an understatement. The micro-tannery is currently housed in a small barn at the back of Millington’s family farm. Two large tanning drums occupy most of the space, limiting annual production to around 10,000 square feet of leather, the same amount some larger tanneries churn through in a single week. But Millington has grand plans for expansion. He has lined up a site in Northampton — an English town famed for shoemaking — and has several secondhand machines in storage, ready for when planning permission comes through.
However, securing the right machinery isn’t easy. Until now, Millington was using the fleshing machine — which has a rotating blade to separate the meat and fat from animal hides — at Northampton University, which ran the last remaining leather tanning course in the UK. The course is now closing after a decline in enrolment numbers. Millington has acquired a secondhand fleshing machine, but needs an engineer to fly over from Italy to fix it before he gets it up and running.
Finding partners is another barrier to scale. “I thought the hardest bit would be learning how to make leather and run a tannery,” says Millington. “But the hardest part was actually finding manufacturers in the UK that were willing to do things at a small scale and a high standard. It took us a couple of years of sampling with different manufacturers to find the right ones.”
Despite the challenges, Millington is buoyed by a growing movement to revive the sector and redefine the value in British materials. In recent years, other micro-tanneries have cropped up. He points to Cotswolds-based farmer James Allen, who won grant funding from the Royal Countryside Fund in 2023, allowing him to learn from other tanneries abroad before building Cotmarsh Tannery in the UK. “It has been really good to see that kind of thing happening,” says Millington. “Capital expenditure is the main barrier to entry, so access to funding is one of the main ways the government or industry could support leather tanning in the UK.”
Button-making: Courtney Co
James Grove Sons was the largest button manufacturer in Britain, and the last remaining custodian of horn button-making, but in 2012, the company went into administration after 155 years. Following a private deal to sell the assets to an aerospace company, most of the machinery was shipped overseas, the staff were laid off — taking their decades of knowledge with them into retirement — and the archive was thrown into a skip.
Business consultant David Courtney heard about the sale in Country Life magazine, and, touched by the story, decided to invest £100,000 in whatever machinery and paraphernalia he could get his hands on, including 8,000 historic dyes and around 30 pattern books. Now, David is on a mission to revive British button-making via Gloucestershire-based Courtney Co, which he runs with his wife Andrea. “In Germany, where Andrea is from, you couldn’t even consider doing something like this unless you prove you have mastered the trade. In the UK, complete idiots like me can just spin the die on it,” he jokes.
The struggle to find qualified staff stalled progress. “Most of the people working at James Grove Sons were already at a pensionable age,” explains David. The original plan was to lease the machines to someone more qualified, but that fell through after two years. Instead, he and Andrea found an expert in polyester button-making who was willing to adapt their skills and machinery for natural buttons, providing undyed buttons that Andrea learnt how to dye, leveraging another ageing expert. “The difference between natural materials and polyester is chalk and cheese, so it was a baptism of fire. We basically learnt by stealth,” says David. Having bought the machinery in 2013, Courtney Co quickly realised it was no longer fit for purpose, and had to replace it with new machinery made in Italy. The company eventually turned its first buttons in 2021.
While the buttons are turned and dyed in the UK, the blanks (coin-shaped circles cut from the natural materials Courtney Co uses to make buttons) are imported. The corozo (aka vegetable ivory) comes from the rainforest in Ecuador (a supply chain often disrupted by earthquakes and floods), the casein is made from 96 per cent Irish milk and produced in Italy, and the horn comes from water buffalo horns, a byproduct of the Indian meat industry. “If we were to try and produce a button that was completely made in the UK, we wouldn’t have many options for the raw material,” says David. “Maybe oyster shells?”
It’s a niche operation, and David is still bankrolling new machinery and staff training through his consulting work, while Andrea has still yet to draw a salary from her role. Courtney Co is slowly growing its capacity, but without government funding, growth is capped. Last year, it produced just one million buttons. “We would be swamped by bigger brands, and they’re often too price sensitive,” he says. In reality, buttons are often an afterthought, and few designers understand the button-making process, or why natural buttons are so much more expensive than polyester ones (Courtney Co could buy polyester buttons for a penny each, while corozo starts at 17 pence, casein at 18 pence and horn at 27 pence).
As a result, its customers tend to be more luxurious and artisanal, with an emphasis on supporting local manufacturing. But the growing demand for Made in the UK is proving fruitful. Gloucestershire brand Bamford is among Courtney Co’s 500 customers, as well as British knitwear brands Herd and Genevieve Sweeney. “There are a number of brands that really care about making things locally, sustainably and paying everyone fairly along the way,” says Andrea. “Now, we have the chance to grow with them.”
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