The Cambridge Satchel Company’s iconic products have become world famous in the last decade. It remains committed to making bags in the UK but would like assistance from the government to encourage consumers to buy locally made products to help manufacturers recover from the challenges of the covid-19 pandemic.

It used to be that, when entrepreneurs launched brands, they felt under pressure to open their own shops as quickly as they could. Investors seemed to care more about square-metres and footfall than about products, where they came from, what they were made from, who made them and how. For months on end this year, shops went dark and any shopping for luxury goods that people were able to do was online. The chief executive and founder of The Cambridge Satchel Company, Julie Deane, says one of the changes that may result from this is an increase in consumer interest in the products themselves.

Julie Deane founded The Cambridge Satchel Company in 2008, launching the company from her kitchen with “seed funding” of £600. In its most recent accounts, the company’s turnover was just under £9 million (it has been higher). The brand achieved global popularity quickly and, by the middle of the last decade, Ms Deane was on all the best lists. She was one of a select group of entrepreneurs invited to travel to China on a 2014 trade mission with then UK prime minister, David Cameron. The following year, Alibaba founder, Jack Ma, asked her to be the keynote speaker at the first in a series of conferences aimed at promoting entrepreneurship among women. Then, in 2016, Virgin Business Media asked her to be part of a panel for the longest-ever business pitch marathon, for which she listened to 160 presentations in 29 hours.

Magic words

Nothing about The Cambridge Satchel Company’s rise to fame was easy, though. Orders began to flood in soon after the bags turned heads at New York Fashion Week in 2010. Ms Deane found that the initial manufacturing partners she was working with were unable to keep up with demand, meaning she had to search for a larger manufacturer. It proved possible to find a company that was skilful enough to make the bags the way she wanted and big enough to help her meet growing demand, but there were other challenges with the new supplier and the relationship was short-lived.

When things came to a head, the manufacturer questioned a woman entrepreneur’s ability to set up a manufacturing operation of her own. Spurred on by what she calls these “magic words” and with her trust in working with third-party manufacturers in general dented, this is precisely what she did. Within three weeks, her bags were in production again. She moved the company’s manufacturing operation to its current location near Leicester a short time after that.

Now, incidentally, to lend a hand to other women, she has become an ambassador for a non-profit organisation called SHE, which aims to help women in developing economies, starting with Sierra Leone, Liberia and Senegal, increase their knowledge and skills and provide them with start-up capital to launch and run their own businesses. The organisation has said it wants to help launch 1 million women-run enterprises by 2030.

Too many chiefs

At the start of 2014, when scaling up the business seemed the obvious and right thing to do, venture capital investors came in to help Julie Deane. She says that, at the time, it was the right thing to do and she remains grateful for the investor support she has received. One of the first things she learned was that The Cambridge Satchel Company lacked and needed a C-Suite, with a chief technology officer, chief marketing officer and so on. The founder says now that, for a brand that had started with £600 and had achieved so much on a shoestring budget, this sudden switch to doing things in a more conventional way, including having a corporate C suite, was a slightly uncomfortable fit with brand’s DNA. It made life expensive too.

Solid footing

Things seem to be on a more solid footing now. The Cambridge Satchel Company factory is in the town of Syston, ten kilometres from Leicester. General manager, Mark Fitzpatrick, says it is a good choice of location. It is close enough to places such as Kettering and Northampton to have some tradition in working with leather, while the industries that Leicester is most famous for in its own right, hosiery and textiles, have also provided a legacy of the skills the company needs for the production of its satchels, backpacks and handbags. “People here can work with their hands,” he says, “and there are plenty who understand the workings of a sewing machine; sewing machinists can be hard to come by. We are also in a convenient location, with great links to motorways, so deliveries to and from the factory are easy."

Strict on thickness

He describes the supply chain that surrounds the sourcing of The Cambridge Satchel Company’s leather as “very stable”. However, he says that finding the right material is a challenge. He explains: “The minimum and maximum thicknesses of the leather we can use in our satchels is very specific. We need material that will form a bag with enough body to be able to hold itself up, but not so rigid that we can’t shape it.” Most suppliers are tanners in continental Europe who know they cannot deliver anything that’s outside the company’s tolerances (if they do, it goes back). The leather comes as trimmed double butts, usually in about a dozen colours. Mr Fitzpatrick says the company is “bold” and if it likes new colours it will add them. “When I started there were seven products in ten colours,” he says. “It’s become more intricate as the business has evolved.” The range now includes ‘batchels’, the company’s largest bags, which it describes as a briefcase-satchel hybrid. Then there are classic satchels in varying sizes, backpacks and work bags, and a wide selection of handbags, ranging from totes to clutches.

Mr Fitzpatrick has worked there since October 2013; industry contacts recommended him to Julie Deane. His family firm, House of Patric, made high-end leather-bound diaries, passport holders, leather-bound photograph albums and other products in Hertfordshire, just north of London, for decades. It supplied a number of luxury brands, with Smythson as its main customer. Smythson’s decision at the end of the first decade of this century to source more of its products from outside the UK presented House of Patric with a tough challenge, but one that it succeeded in responding to. It managed to replace the business it lost through the change in strategy at Smythson and the business continued for several years before the pressure of chasing smaller payments from a larger number of customers became difficult to cope with. House of Patric was acquired by luggage brand Globetrotter, for whom Mark Fitzpatrick continued to work as production director and from whom Julie Deane recruited him a few years later.

Unique experience

“This is a brilliant factory,” he says of the current facility. It is newer, brighter and bigger than the company’s first, the one Ms Deane set up after hearing “the magic words”. Thirty-five craftspeople work there and the factory’s current capacity is around 6,000 bags per month, under normal circumstances. Of course, the circumstances in recent months have been far from normal. “It’s been a unique experience,” Mark Fitzpatrick says of covid-19, lockdown and the restart. “There was confusion about what you could and couldn’t do. The world stopped and everyone disappeared. We got to late March and I could tell that some of the people who work in the factory were becoming a little uncertain about the situation. Then we shut the shops and, with the shops closed, we realised we didn’t need to continue manufacturing for the time being, so we shut the factory too."

Three or four people attending the site were enough to fulfil internet orders throughout those weeks. Now more members of the team have returned to work, although, even at the end of July, still not everyone. Two of the five own-brand shops the company runs has reopened and there are plans for another two to reopen soon. The stores are in Cambridge, London, Oxford, Edinburgh and at the Bicester Village outlet centre close to Oxford (a little ironically, the Oxford stores have been first to raise the shutters; the rivalry between the two university towns is more than eight centuries old). The bricks-and-mortar stores are important to The Cambridge Satchel Company and it insists it will not become reliant on e-commerce only. “We do lots of business with tourists,” the general manager says. “We need tourism to pick up again. Also, in-store interaction with customers is important. Stores can move and change, footfall can change, shopping habits can change, but people will still come to shops and maybe now they will come even more determined to buy, not just to browse."

Development work on the company’s e-commerce operations has also gone on in recent months. Ms Deane says she has observed changes in buyers’ mood over the months of lockdown. At first, the focus was more on handbags, perhaps as a form of retail therapy, and, with most people spending almost all of their time at home, work bags and backpacks were less in demand. Then, when lockdown began to lift, people’s thoughts turned more to work bags and, as restrictions lifted further, the chance to go back into the great outdoors generated more interest in backpacks again. She reinforces the point about customer interaction and says it would be helpful for e-commerce software to become an easy-to-use business intelligence resource. “I’d like to be able to have real value from the online platform,” she says, “to know more about the customer. It would be so helpful to feel we were getting every possible piece of information we can on the customer."

In truth, The Cambridge Satchel Company has been interacting with customers and influencers online since the outset. So much so that Google decided to feature the leathergoods brand in an advertisement for its Chrome web browser that ran extensively on television, digital media and in cinemas in the autumn of 2012. The ad told the story of the start-up in 60 seconds and included old footage of Julie Deane, her family, her kitchen (full of bags), as well as of catwalk presentations and a warm response to the bags from fashionable young people everywhere. It recreated early online contact with consumers and influencers, accurately portraying the products as classic satchels of a kind that companies seemed to have ceased to make, but with colourful, contemporary twists available on request. The brand says now that the Google Chrome ad had a huge impact on its success; it had 4 million views in the first month and was instrumental in putting The Cambridge Satchel Company at the forefront of lots of people’s minds.

Deserving of protection

Julie Deane and Mark Fitzpatrick are outspoken champions of maintaining manufacturing in the UK, where services set the tone of the economy. It is no coincidence that what the sign outside the factory proclaims is that the company’s bags are handmade in Great Britain, an unusual sight in this part of the world in the 2020s. “There is a perception among a lot of people in the UK that manufacturing is a dirty job,” Mr Fitzpatrick says. “But young people do come into our factory to work; they say it’s because they didn’t want to work in an office. To work instead in a place selling insurance would be soulless for them.” He insists that manufacturing jobs in the UK deserve protection. He would like the government to eliminate, even if temporarily, value added tax on products that are demonstrably and certifiably made domestically. A parallel benefit would be helping people move away from the buy-use (briefly)-dispose mentality that lower-cost imports have helped instil. “Imagine that,” he says. “Suddenly customers would find that our products were 20% cheaper. What a boost that would give."

For her part, Julie Deane says she has seen some signs since the coronavirus lockdown lifted that there is increased interest in the stories behind brands. “People are interested in where things are made and how things are made,” she says. “We are getting a lot of interest in sustainability and in what the brand stands for. We are a very sustainable brand and people seem very interested in who they are choosing to buy from and there is also a sense that people want to support a local brand. I would like to think people are a bit more informed and that we are, perhaps, witnessing an ethical shift.”

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