WARDROBE CRISIS with Clare Press

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 process