Rebuild by Mary Portas

Author:Mary Portas [Portas, Mary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473595156
Publisher: Transworld
Published: 2021-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

7

What’s Your Double V?

I didn’t come from a middle-class background. My parents were Irish immigrants who arrived in Watford in the late fifties and soon had a family of five children to raise. My dad worked in sales and my mother knew the importance of budgeting. Trotting along behind her to all the local shops, I absorbed from her the concept of good value.

Somehow, though, over the years, the meaning of ‘good value’ has changed. ‘Value’ has become synonymous with ‘cheap’ or, to use marketing-speak, ‘affordable’. It sounds noble: why should people be denied choice and variety and fun stuff just because they aren’t wealthy?

But let’s pick it apart a bit, because what seems to be missing from this interpretation of ‘value’ is the word that for my mother’s generation automatically preceded it: good value. This isn’t the same as cheap, which does nothing for society, nothing for the planet, and nothing for people’s wellbeing.

So, when Channel 4 approached me in 2012 to make a series on UK manufacturing, I initially refused. They wanted to see if we could make a £5 pair of jeans to compete with Primark while using UK manufacturing. I never wanted to do that show. It would have been a race to the bottom.

My question was, ‘Can’t we turn this on its head? Can’t we make a product that captures the true value of UK manufacturing instead?’ My team and I went back to Channel 4 and said: no, we’ll do it if we can create our own brand. We wanted to make a product that was slightly more expensive but that we believed would give real good value: not only in its price, and its quality, but in what its production could do for society. We came up with the product: Kinky Knickers – a brand of mid-market underwear, proudly made in Britain.

Instead of denim, we wanted to ask the question: would people be prepared to pay a little more for something made in this country? What if they knew that it was providing employment and apprenticeships, contributing to long-term skills? It wouldn’t be a show-off purchase – this is underwear, it’s out of sight – but it would be lace, handmade here. (M&S, the biggest supplier of the nation’s knickers, had been the last to go offshore with their manufacturing.) Would we be able to compete? I wanted to see whether it is practically possible – and financially viable – to restart production here in Britain again.

Our goal wasn’t just about putting people in employment, but starting apprenticeships that can stoke long-term skills. If we could get people to buy into the idea of the brand, rather than just buying nice pants, we could start a ball rolling that might just be transformative. There was a lot to do. We had to find a factory that could help us and track down the right machinery for production because so much of it has been sent abroad. But then we reached the real sticking point: machinists.

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