By partnering with British Pasture Leather, Mulberry has managed to keep its supply chain as local as possible, sourcing the hides from Pasture for Life-certified farms in the south-west of England. The hides were then vegetable tanned at Thomas Ware and Sons in Bristol, taken to Blenkinsop Leathers in Northamptonshire for finishing, and then transported to Mulberry’s Somerset HQ, The Rookery, where the leather was turned into bags by the company’s highly skilled craftspeople.
Given that the majority of hides from farms in the UK are currently being sent abroad, British Pasture Leather founders Sara Grady and Alice Robinson are determined to prove the value of homegrown leather. “Our beginning was seeing this opportunity: hides are not valued, even though there are forms of farming where we believe that the practices and the products should be more highly valued,” Grady says.
The biggest challenge? Getting the infrastructure in place in order for a fully traceable supply chain to be established. Typically, hides sourced from different farms are mixed up, so Grady and Robinson needed to work with suppliers to ensure that Pasture for Life-certified hides were sorted and collected separately. Beyond that, finding tanneries in the UK that can take raw bovine hides, while using a traditional vegetable-based process, proved to be another hurdle. “The pinch point for us is the tanning,” Grady explains. “If we were able to tan more hides in the UK, we would have a more readily available path to scaling production.”
Each bag was made by skilled artisans at Mulberry’s Somerset HQ, The Rookery.
Courtesy of Mulberry
To celebrate the regenerative British leather used in the collection, Mulberry made the conscious choice to embrace the natural character of the material – in contrast to the heavily treated hides that dominate our bag collections. While conventional leather will usually have a protective PU coating, the hides used in Mulberry’s latest bag drop were simply finished with natural wax and oil. “If you get caught in the rain, you need to be mindful of that because this leather is not highly finished and protected,” Wollacott says, noting that each bag will come with a care kit and a newspaper explaining the idea behind the collection. “I think that we’ve crafted a really lovely message on why this is going to look better with age, and how it’s going to burnish, and the patina’s going to really come out. It’s arguably how leather should be as a material.”
For both Mulberry and British Pasture Leather, the story behind each bag in the collection – with only 80 produced in total – is just as important as the product itself. “We truly believe that these bags are proper investments in a British supply chain,” Wollacott concludes. “We always say, the only thing better than a brand new Mulberry bag is an old Mulberry bag. And I truly believe that this leather is going to be the storytelling behind that.”
The Mulberry X British Pasture Leather collection will go on sale from 28 April