Sign up to receive the Vogue Business newsletter for the latest luxury news and insights, plus exclusive membership discounts.
In a step forward for the UK’s reshoring efforts, knitwear brand John Smedley is opening up its factory in England for third-party manufacturing for the first time in 40 years.
Until the mid-1980s, John Smedley created knitwear for luxury players including Prada, Burberry, Paul Smith and Vivienne Westwood. However, this stopped when brands began to outsource production to China to save money, and it focused instead on growing its own label.
Now — after identifying an uptick in demand for the ‘Made in UK’ label — the company is reopening its production lines to other brands, starting with orders for the Spring/Summer 2025 season. It has already spent upwards of £3 million on installing new knitting machinery in its factory in Derbyshire, and will invest a further £1.5 million in upgrading the site and expanding its teams this year.
“It’s a generational change in our manufacturing capabilities, enabling us to serve our own needs and those of our clients,” says John Smedley managing director Ian Maclean, who was awarded an MBE in 2020 for services to the UK textile industry and the company’s response to Covid (it produced scrubs for hospitals at the height of the pandemic).
The investment comes at a critical time for Made in UK, which is undergoing a tentative revival as the cost of manufacturing overseas grows, and sustainability legislation demands greater supply chain traceability and transparency from fashion brands (which is easier if those brands produce closer to home). Proponents say reshoring helps to shorten lead times, reduces the carbon footprint of production and gives brands more control over quality. UK manufacturers can also be more flexible with minimum order quantities, which is beneficial for smaller brands.
However, Made in UK still faces several challenges: not least a post-Brexit shortage of skilled machinists. And, in recent months, manufacturers have been hit by the collapse of Matches, and the ongoing struggles of British designers. On 17 April, UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s wife Akshata Murty hosted a ‘matchmaking’ event aimed at introducing British fashion and retail businesses to locally based manufacturers and suppliers, as a way of boosting the industry. But most agree that significantly more needs to be done to support home-grown manufacturing.
“If you’re purely a manufacturer, it’s difficult not to feel like your business is built on sand because you don’t know when the next contract is coming,” says John Smedley deputy managing director Jess Mcguire-Dudley. She argues that John Smedley has an advantage because it is both a brand and a manufacturer. The John Smedley brand has 13 bricks-and-mortar stores across the UK and Japan, its own e-commerce site and wholesale partners in 47 countries worldwide, including Mr Porter, Selfridges, Harrods, Harvey Nichols, Isetan, De Bijenkorf and Le Bon Marché. The company’s annual turnover is £18 million.
Provenance over price
Mcguire-Dudley says that, until relatively recently, many British brands have remained focused on manufacturing as cheaply as possible. Now the tide is turning. “Brands have had to make a decision: are you going for price, or are you going for provenance? And there has been this shift back towards provenance, to deliver that story of authenticity for customers and become more responsible businesses,” she says.
Traceability and transparency are some of the biggest arguments for bringing production of clothing closer to home. John Smedley’s merino and British wools are sourced from farms in the UK — where fibres travel less than 300 miles from field to its Derbyshire factory — as well as from long-standing suppliers in New Zealand.
“Most British brands are headquartered in London — our factory in Derbyshire is an hour and a half away,” says Mcguire-Dudley. “You can come and speak to the design team, see a sample or resolve an issue, really quickly. You wouldn’t have that same openness if you’re only going to visit your factory once a year or everything is communicated via email or [Microsoft] Teams.”
Following initial conversations with brands to gauge interest, John Smedley has lined up its first clients. Among them, it has agreed to produce a 12-piece knitwear collection for British brand Daks for SS25, under a new collaborative label. John Smedley will focus on supplying luxury and designer labels, but Mcguire-Dudley emphasises that it’s “less about big names and more about building a long-term collective of like-minded brands to champion British manufacturing”.
John Smedley is also exploring how to manufacture more responsibly. A new programme in partnership with Yorkshire-based textile recycling mill Iinouiio will turn waste yarns into new ones. Knitting waste from John Smedley’s production process will be sent to Iinouiio, where it will be shredded back to fibre form and blended with 50 per cent virgin merino wool, before being respun (a traditional technique known as ‘shoddy’ manufacturing).
These recycled and recyclable fibres will be used for John Smedley own-brand products from October 2024, and made available to external brands from the AW25 season onwards. “We’re not perfect — I don’t think anybody is — but we are always striving to do more and be better,” says Mcguire-Dudley.
John Smedley’s investment is a welcome signal that demand is there for UK manufacturing, says Adam Mansell, CEO of the UK Fashion and Textile Association (UKFT). “The substantial investment in machinery to accommodate third-party manufacturing is a game changer for progressive brands looking to reshore production. This move not only strengthens the 240-year-old company, supporting local jobs and skilled craftsmanship, but also offers a compelling opportunity for brands seeking to bring their production closer to home.”
Comments, questions or feedback? Email us at feedback@voguebusiness.com.
More from this author:
Harvey Nichols appoints new CEO to accelerate growth
What really happened with Matches and where do we go from here?
