“We have a strong voice and point of view and are keen to grow that” BC: How many fleeces was your initial order. TK: 25 of each style, so 50 products, retailing at £120. Which people thought was expensive at the time, but when they see the brand and realise the deeper stuff behind it in terms of manufacturing, ethics and environmental traceability, it makes it worthwhile. And the performance of the garments is fantastic. We now do 20, 25 styles, hooded jacket, waterproof, merino wool, and in those styles, two or three different colours. BC: Merino wool is traditionally sourced from Australia and New Zealand, but you’re trying to get it over here. How is that going? TK: It’s getting there. There’s a thing on our website about the Bowmont Project, a 100% UK supply chain. The flock in Devon has gone from 29 sheep to 140 sheep. We’ve got our first products off them last winter. We’ve got a merino Bowmont beanie, and this year a knitwear jersey is coming out. BC: How do you go about sourcing suppliers, checking that they are the sort of businesses you want to deal with? TK: Because we’ve been quite small, a lot of our dealings are on personal relationships, and we want that to carry on. We know all our suppliers; we’ve visited all
their factories and we know who they are. And Debs our production director does a lot of work on this, something she has really brought along. She has worked on business traceability and the i-spy campaign. You get an intuition into whether they are shysters or not. Looking around the factories you can tell if they’re well run. BC: I guess you could source a lot cheaper in places like the Far East? TK: Of course you could. We get guys coming here all the time asking why are we making it in Europe for? BC: And quality is probably improving in these countries, too? TK: There’s some stuff coming from the Far East and the quality is good, but traceability wise and transparency wise, there is still a question mark. But there are some good responsible brands making stuff in these places now, but for us, a small business but with a big voice, at the moment we would rather have guys we know, down the road in the UK, or down the road in Portugal, who we can visit and see, can do our minimum orders, and can look after us. But since we started out, the whole transparency and traceability thing throughout the business world has got much better, which is a really good thing. BC: As you become bigger, does it get more difficult?
TK: It’s that old age thing, do your suppliers grow with you, or do you move suppliers? But we’ve been with our existing suppliers and our guy in Portugal for four, five years now. I’m not saying we’ll be with him forever, you can’t say that sort of thing, but fundamentally we have a load of principals that apply to a manufacturing supply chain that’s applicable to any factory, whatever size. So if it’s a big one in a new place, we can go in and look around, see the accreditation, carbon policy etc and use that as a framework to foster new relationships. BC: Are these kinds of principles what Finisterre is particularly well known for do you think? TK: I hope so, but we don’t do stuff to be well known for it, but it did start out as one of the founding principles of the business. Hopefully when people think of the business, they think of really good kit, looks good and performs well, and is made from responsible fabrics. Because as well as the manufacturing, it’s also the fabrics we use, organic cotton, and made in open transparent places. Our marketing is quite open and I hope we’re known for that. BC: You could have grown a lot quicker and made more money if you sacrificed these principles. Is it bad to make money, or are there just bad ways of making money? TK: We’re a business, so we’re not saying we’re whiter than white. We cause damage, pollution, but we’ve got a good brand and we’re really proud of it and there’s a lot of purpose behind the brand. We need to pay bills and make money, there’s no question about it, but we have a strong voice and point of view and are keen to grow that. BC: Are businesses in general taking Corporate Social Responsibility more seriously? TK: They are. But for us, it’s just something that we do. I don’t mean to sound cheesy, but it’s just what we do. We don’t have a CSR policy in the file. If you are a bigger business that has been going for the past 25 years as the green movement has came along, you need a CSR policy, but for us this is one of the reasons we started in the first place. We thought we could do it better from a product point of view and from an environmental and ethical point of view. It’s just part of what we do. BC: And you appeared in Richard Branson’s book Screw Business As Usual. How did that come about?
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Face to Face
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Business Cornwall Magazine - October 2012