One of the questions that came up on one of our recent British Brand Accelerator group coaching calls was so good, I thought I'd bring it to you on the podcast this week.

The question was about whether a small business that makes in the UK should be offering a discount when someone opts in to their newsletter, and whether this strategy works.

It opened a whole discussion amongst the group about the pros and cons of discounting and other ideas for getting potential customers to sign up to your newsletter.

So if you are wondering the same thing about discounting, this episode is for you!

Sign up the the British Brand Accelerator waitlist here - www.makeitbritish.co.uk/waitlist

This week I’m bringing some very sad news - that the UK’s only cotton spinning mill, English Fine Cottons, which brought cotton spinning back to Greater Manchester in 2018, has very sadly gone into administration.

In case you don’t know about the history of English Fine Cottons, it was set up by the technical textile spinners Culimeta-Saveguard, who invested £4.8m of its own money, £2m of which was a loan from the Greater Manchester Combined Authority, to regenerate a former Victorian cotton mill and install new technology to create luxury yarn. A further £1m was awarded as a grant by the N Brown Textile Growth Programme.

English Fine Cottons was the start of something very exciting in UK manufacturing, and for this to have happened is tragic. The collapse into administration is caused by the parent group Culimeta-Saveguard going down, and unfortunately that has taken the cotton spinning down with it. Something needs to be done to save our only cotton spinning mill, otherwise this is history repeating itself.

So today's episode is a remastered version of a visit that I did to English Fine Cottons in 2019, along with an interview with Andy Ogden, who was the general manager at the time.

Back in 2012 I was contacted by someone who was trying to save the UK’s last remaining horn button maker - Grove & Sons. He was looking for investors to buy up the machinery and pattern books from the business so that the art of natural button making in the UK was not lost.

Well it turns out that the investor that this guy eventually found was someone called David Courtney, who saw an ad to buy the machinery and patterns, and decided that he wanted to help.

But things are never as easy as the seem, and this initial investment took David Courtney down a very long and winding path to bring button making back to the UK.

Over a decade later and David Courtney now has an amazing button-making factory in the Cotswolds, with state of the art machinery, producing buttons from 3 different types of materials. He’s also enlisted his lovely wife Andrea to head the factory up, and they now supply the most beautiful buttons to brands and designers wanting an authentic UK-made button, still made using the original patterns that David saved from Grove & Sons.

This interview was recorded onsite in their factory in Bourton-on-the-Water, Gloucestershire, and Andrea and David recount the full tale of how Courtney & Co buttons got to where they are today.

About Courtney & Co

Courtney & Co Website

Courtney & Co on Instagram

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