Good deal on Harris tweed...

[Grizzly]

Harris Tweed remains a wonderful cloth with a highly protected manufacturing process. The cloth itself is expensive but as long as the weavers are being properly supported then where the cloth goes should not matter - but in 2006 the whole industry nearly died because of a buy out of the major mill by a Yorkshire Businessman, Brian Haggas, who switched the production to only 4 patterns of cloth and made a fixed range of jackets with the cloth. The weavers went from boom to bust inside a year because of his business model. But the company are, I understand, still selling their jackets.

Fortunately for Harris Tweed, Brian Haggas did not get to take over the whole of production and some independent production continued. A consortium bought and brought back an old mill and production of the beautiful diversity of the Tweed has been allowed to flourish, thanks in particular to fashion users like Patrick Grant and finding new markets for tweed (like car interiors).

If you can get a deal on a Tweed jacket - Great! But I would hate to see another debacle through production of a limited range of tweed for 'cheap' jackets which risked the loss of the wider range of cloth production.

Well said Harvey. Harris tweed is a unique cloth traditionally made from dyes extracted from local Hebridean plants and with wool from the local sheep. It would be an absolute tragedy if this artisan product were to be swallowed up by large conglomerates.