Meet British accessories designer turned local leather supply chain builder,Alice Robinson. With her business partner Sarah Grady, Alice runs Grady & Robinson, a startup that’s trying to rebuild the local leather supply chain in the UK, in a totally traceable way, connecting regenerative farmers with processing and vegetable tanning in Britain.
Their goal is to offer a product that traceable to its farm source, made entirely in the UK, and biodegradable at end of life. That’s a big ask, because the industry has all but disappeared in Britain, so if you’re a emerging handbag designer – as Alice was when she was studying at the Royal College of Art a few years ago - and you want to buy single origin leather locally, you pretty much can’t. This didn’t sit well with her, so as you will hear, Alice decided to do it herself - buying a sheep five miles away from her home in rural Shropshire, and documenting its entire journey from the field it lived in, through its slaughter, through to the tanning processes and accessories production.
Today Grady & Robinson is working with Mulberry and the Institute for Creative Leather Technology at Northampton University, through the government supported R&D project, The Business of Fashion, Textiles and Technology to try to figure out a way to finish leather at a commercial scale in the UK, with ingredients that are known to be sustainable, natural and biodegradable.
