The Tweed crisis that became an opportunity

Ian Angus had just transitioned from being chief executive of the Harris Tweed Authority to the same role with a new company, Harris Tweed Hebrides, which had acquired the mill. From that day to this, he has been at the heart of the business and its success.

He takes over now as chairman of the company as I draw a line under one of the great privileges of my life – to have been involved not only in building a successful island company from scratch but also in the regeneration of a noble and precious industry.

Ian Angus knew everything there was to know about the Harris Tweed industry and how it could be turned around. My initial

involvement owed less to what I knew than who I knew, as well as an acute awareness of how important Harris Tweed was to island society.

I had come out of politics in 2005 for family reasons and we made the permanent move to Mangersta the following year. I knew I wouldn’t be short of things to do but wanted to be involved in something useful for the islands. I had no clear idea of what.

The answer was soon provided for me. By 2007, the Harris Tweed industry was in a deep crisis. Derick Murray had sold the Mackenzie mill in Stornoway to Brian Haggas, a Yorkshire textiles entrepreneur.

At first, that seemed like good news. Haggas had experience and

money.

All that changed when Haggas revealed his business plan to an astonished workforce and community. He intended to cut the number of Harris Tweed patterns down to four – not four thousand or four hundred but four. Furthermore, he intended not to sell the fabric to anyone with the entire production committed to a range of men’s jackets, marketed through another of his companies, Brook Taverner.

Anyone buying a Harris Tweed jacket anywhere in the world would have to buy a Haggas product. As a business plan, it was seriously bonkers. As an existential threat to the Harris Tweed industry it was exceptionally serious as was confirmed when the Mackenzie workforce was soon paid off while 75,000 of his uninspiring jackets hung in Keighley warehouses.

As this grim scenario evolved, I received a phone call from Sandy Matheson which proved to be significantly life-enhancing. The Shawbost mill which Derick also owned had not been included in the Haggas deal. If investment could be found, it might be brought back to life in order to break the Haggas monopoly and give the industry a future. Did I know anybody …?

The approach was not completely random. A couple of years earlier, Derick had asked me the same question about the Mackenzie business and I tried to help with an answer. I asked a friend, Ian Taylor, to take a look, which he did. Ian came up a couple of times, met Derick and sent in his accountants before deciding it was a case of “thanks, but no thanks”.

Starting a new business with a smaller initial investment was a different proposition and I was pretty sure that, if I asked him, Ian would back a start-up company, which he duly did. One of the few conditions was that I became chairman and “front man” which suited me very well. Thus was Harris Tweed Hebrides born – or almost.

There was still one obstacle to clear. Derick felt honour-bound to ask Haggas if he wanted to match the offer we had agreed for Shawbost in which case he would have given his bid preference. Fortunately, Haggas was so convinced of his own invincibility that he told Derick nobody would dare challenge him and to sell Shawbost to whomsoever he liked. We were in business.

The story about how I got to know Ian Taylor has been told before (often). It draws a direct line between dinner with Fidel Castro and regeneration of the Harris Tweed industry which has the virtue of being completely true.

When I became UK Trade Minister in 1998, I made it a personal mission to normalise commercial relations with Cuba in which I had a longstanding interest. The first time I went there, I was taken straight to dinner with Fidel and we got on well. On my next visit, another guest at the table was Ian Taylor, who was a bit of a hero in Havana.

His company, Vitol, had bailed out Cuba by supplying it with oil after the collapse of the Soviet Union and getting paid in sugar. In the world of commodity trading, Ian was regarded as the best in the business, and also the boldest risk-taker. In an interview with the Financial Times, he recalled our first encounter.

“We both sat up with Fidel Castro until 4 a.m., drinking the last two bottles of 1956 Bordeaux donated by (former French president) François Mitterand”. It is definitely the best name-drop sentence I’ve ever featured in and it laid the foundations for our subsequent friendship – and, ultimately, Harris Tweed Hebrides.

When Ian agreed to bankroll most of the Shawbost acquisition and the investment which followed, the islands also found a very true friend. From the day he became involved till the day he died, from throat cancer in 2020, he brought enthusiasm, acumen and commitment to the evolution of the company and revival of the industry.

Until ill health struck him down, Ian maintained a crazy schedule dealing direct with presidents and potentates but whenever asked, he found time for Harris Tweed Hebrides. He backed whatever investment Shawbost required and shared my own belief that to make an impact, we needed to do things in a style which matched the status of the product.

By November 2007, Harris Tweed was on the brink. Haggas had issued the instruction that clients around the world were to be told they might as well go elsewhere because they would not be able to buy Harris Tweed in future. Within even another few weeks, many would have taken him at his word, made other arrangements and been lost for ever.

One of the first conversations in my unexpected new role was with the head of menswear at Ralph Lauren, a loyal and prestigious user of Harris Tweed for decades. He was incandescent. “No supplier sacks Ralph Lauren”, he roared. “Ralph Lauren sacks suppliers!”. It really was a race against time, to assure clients that there was a new player in the game and supply was assured.

Rae Mackenzie, who was sales director at the Mackenzie mill, had bravely defied the Haggas edict by accepting a huge order from a German company which was at that time their biggest customer.

That bought a little time for the weavers. Rae then delayed retirement to help Harris Tweed Hebrides through these crucial early days by “rescuing” the customers Haggas had told to go elsewhere.

Ian Angus recruited the best and most experienced people in the industry to head the various departments – the late Ken Kennedy, Donald Mackay, D.A. Murray, Roddy Martin. There had been no double-width finishing capacity at Shawbost and this became an immediate priority. Astonishingly, within five months of the doors re-opening at Shawbost mill, the first finished tweeds were ready for dispatch in May 2008.

Allowing for only a little poetic licence, we determined that the first order to leave the mill was bound for Russia. Every good story needs a decent picture. After a round of Scotland’s model agencies, we found a Russian student and part-time model living in Edinburgh. It was the first of many Harris Tweed Hebrides photo-opportunities!

I had brought on board Mark Hogarth as Creative Director. By coincidence, I first met Mark when I arranged for the Harris Tweed Authority to have the use of Dover House in Whitehall for an event during London Fashion Week six years earlier – the first time the venue was used for that kind of purpose.

Mark was then combining being a politics student and part-time model. Even more improbably, he was a constituent of mine and when he finished his degree I was able to give him work as a researcher when he wasn’t modelling in Japan. When Harris Tweed Hebrides came along, his knowledge of the fashion world became invaluable.

The Haggas story alone demonstrated how much the Harris Tweed image was in need of a re-vamp. When Harris Tweed Hebrides started, more than 90 per cent of production went into men’s jackets. I remember Ian Angus describing the demographic as “from 60 to death”. In order to change that, we set about working with young designers and creating partnerships with high profile brands.

One of the most satisfying early events was a show at An Lanntair in Stornoway with top international models and outfits to match. It was a very glamourous occasion. After years of doom and gloom, it was important to remind the local audience as well as the outside world of Harris Tweed’s esteem as a fabric of fashion at the highest levels and that it had a future as well as a past.

These early years were really exciting as the business boomed and the profile of Harris Tweed soared. Weavers were coming into the industry for the first time in a couple of decades, as they saw in it a future and a good living. Overwhelmingly, success was based on the skills and commitment of the workers who created the product and organised its shipment around the world.

For a while, we were showered with awards – for style, for fashion, for quality, for exporting … The Institute of Directors was kind enough to name me as UK Global Director of the Year which even I thought was a bit excessive. However, modesty was trumped by the irony of having the award presented by Michael Portillo, erstwhile scourge of all things Labour, particularly where business was involved!

For Ian Angus and the real professionals, however, the awards that mattered most were for Harris Tweed Hebrides being named in 2013 as both the UK Textiles Business and UK Textiles Manufacturing Company of the year by their peers in the industry. This was the ultimate recognition of what they had achieved and has since been sustained.

Mark and I travelled extensively to explore new markets, promote events and create partnerships with other prestigious brands. It was rarely a hardship. We often worked with British Embassies to ensure that Harris Tweed was to the fore in their thinking about trade promotion and the value of this network should never be under-estimated. Korea was one market it helped to open up.

Characteristic of our promotional adventures, one of these began when I read that in the film “Argo”, about the rescue of hostages during the Iranian revolution, the actor Ben Affleck modelled himself on the real-life CIA man he was playing, Tony Mendez, which explained the Harris Tweed jackets he wore throughout the film.

We couldn’t afford Ben Affleck but I tracked down Tony Mendez who confirmed the whole story. In the 1970s, he said, Harris Tweed jackets and chinos was the standard dress code of CIA agents. It wasn’t the role model I would have chosen but it led to a memorable media lunch in New York with Tony and his wife as guests of honour – and loads of publicity!

Another exercise that sticks in the mind was when Johnnie Walker commissioned a Harris Tweed imbued with the scent of whisky for a promotional campaign in some of their European markets.

Fortunately, this involved creating a fragrance reflecting the ingredients of whisky rather than the finished product, which was then injected into the fabric with help from Heriot Watt University. Variety was always the spice of Harris Tweed life.

At home, we created a lasting liaison with the Edinburgh-based tailoring company, Walker Slater, to produce bespoke tweeds for major events and sporting organisations. It started with the Ryder Cup at Gleneagles and has carried on through Scottish Rugby, the SFA and the Edinburgh Military Tattoo.

The Princess Royal has been a great supporter of Harris Tweed and it was fitting that, in 2017, she opened a major extension to the Shawbost mill. As patron of the Scottish Rugby Union, she unfailingly wears her Harris Tweed jacket on international match days.

Her brother, now the King, is also a great fan of Harris Tweed and as in many matters was far ahead of his time in promoting the whole “sustainability’ agenda. Ian Taylor and I took part in a ‘round table’ he summoned at Highgrove. This proved to be the launch-pad for the Campaign for Wool of which he remains patron while Mark retains the HTH connection as a board member.

The demand for “sustainability” has been one of the major pressures on the fashion and textiles world in recent years. Fortunately, Harris Tweed is in a uniquely strong position to benefit from it. For more than a century, the fabric has been noted for lasting a lifetime which now makes it the antithesis of “fast fashion”. There is nothing more sustainable than products made from pure wool.

It is a tribute to how the company has diversified that less than half of production now goes into men’s jackets. The accessories market took off first in Japan, where Harris Tweed is revered for its quality and provenance, and has now become a major UK sector as evidenced on every High Street. The interiors market has also grown in importance over the past decade.

An important benefit of this diversification has been to reduce the seasonality of the industry. Uncertainty of employment, with mills habitually laying-off and laying-on the workforce at their convenience, had long struck me as one of the industry’s less admirable features. The weavers too have been given far greater certainty of demand, to meet their needs and expectations.

Another pleasing aspect of the past 15 years has been to see the age profile of the industry reduce dramatically. For the previous couple of decades, there had been few new entrants either as mill workers or weavers because there was no great confidence in the future. Like every other sector, however, Harris Tweed will face the problem of decline in the islands’ working-age population, unless something radical is done to turn that around.

In an industry (and island) where far too few women have had leadership positions, it is a matter for some satisfaction that Harris Tweed Hebrides bucks that stereotype with Tina Taylor joining the board, Elaine Macrury as finance director, Margaret Ann Macleod as sales director and female occupation of other key roles. With Lorna Macaulay as chief executive of the HTA, a formerly male-dominated industry is now an island leader in merit-based gender equality.

Whenever I speak about the Harris Tweed industry, I remind my audience that little of it would exist if it had not been for the vision of the people who, in the early 1990s, saw the need to safeguard the brand and industry for the islands by promoting legislation which would provide cast iron protection. The result of that was the Harris Tweed Act of 1993 which created the HTA.

The success of recent years has only emphasised the importance of that protection. If a fabric could be made anywhere else in the world and called Harris Tweed, then that is exactly what would have happened long before now. By the same legislation, no individual or company can own the brand – which was the vital safeguard in 2007.

One final reminiscence. A few years back, we made contact with a retail company with outlets across India which wanted to buy Harris Tweed. They pulled all their sales managers together for an annual get-together on Goa to which Mark and I were invited to explain the Clò Mor. I have a distinct memory of it crossing my mind, as I spoke about Harris Tweed in an idyllic setting on Goa with a garland of flowers round my neck: “Whatever else I thought I’d be doing when I left politics, it certainly wasn’t this”.

It’s been a wonderful journey to be involved in. The company is in excellent hands. The Taylor family’s commitment to Ian’s legacy is secure. Long may it all continue.