The artisans of the future have a glass ceiling that they must remove if they are to receive the support, training and qualifications their talents deserve. Spain’s Círculo Fortuny has launched a new project to help make this happen. 

Artisan producers of leathergoods, shoes and other items in Spain make up more than 35% of the country’s overall manufacturing footprint, but contribute only 4.9% of manufacturing’s share of the country’s gross domestic product.

These figures come from a new study compiled by consultancy group KPMG, commissioned by Círculo Fortuny, an organisation that represents all segments of the luxury sector in Spain. Círculo Fortuny unveiled the report at an awards event it held in Madrid in May to give recognition to master artisans from across the land. At the same time, it launched a new project to help Spanish artisan manufacturers develop their businesses in ways that will give them and the craftsmanship skills of which they are custodians a healthy future.

Hallmark of high-end products

In the KPMG study, ‘Artisanship in Spain: the hallmark of high-end products’, the consultancy firm said there were 64,000 companies making artisan products in Spain, employing a total of 213,000 people. Collectively, these companies achieved a turnover of more than €6 billion in 2019, the most recent year referenced in the report. Despite being from before the covid-19 pandemic, KPMG said the 2019 total showed a decline of 5% compared to the figure for 2015.

It identified an over-complex certification system for artisan products across the country as one of the barriers to growth, pointing to different criteria in different regions for classifying businesses as artisan manufacturers. There are even differences in the rules for deciding which producers are allowed to use titles such as ‘artisan’ and ‘master artisan’ when describing themselves. “These differences are in contrast to the situation in countries such as France or Germany,” the report said, “where there is a common framework, which in turn makes collective planning and action easier.”

Strong storytelling on a plate

KPMG partner Enrique Porta said on presenting the report that, in spite of its vulnerability, there are characteristics that set Spanish artisanship apart and that these represent “a great opportunity for a strong future”. Mr Porta’s view is that  the ability of artisan manufacturers to add value is something bigger luxury brands can tap into. He insists that ‘handmade in Spain’ is synonymous with high-quality products, along with a commitment to social responsibility and a culture that “fuses history with creativity and design”. This, he says, allows big brands to tell a strong story about the products they offer, describing this as an essential element of their efforts to stand out.

Following the release of the report, KPMG and Círculo Fortuny have called on institutions, public bodies and business groups to support artisanship by, for example, setting up training opportunities for small producers to become “more professional” and learn how to operate in the digital world. “This would help advance the development of those producers,” Mr Porta says, “at the same time as safeguarding and preserving a part of Spain’s cultural heritage and reinforcing a value proposition that sets Spain apart.”

Artisan priorities

He goes on to talk about a cultural heritage that has been enriched over centuries and that now, in the 2020s, opens up a series of wider economic opportunities. “We need to grab those opportunities and push forward with them,” he says. This is what the new project will seek to encourage and Mr Porta says the team behind it has identified six priorities.

Master artisans must be given the time, space, tools and rewards to train new generations of workers. Their work and their skills need to become higher profile and earn the attention they deserve. There needs to be public support for this, financially and at policy level. Helping artisan manufacturers take advantage of digital technology is another of the priorities that Mr Porta points to. “This will be a way of letting the whole world see the quality of these companies’ products,” he adds. “It will be a way of connecting to a new generation of customers, people spread throughout the world who have a desire to buy Spanish artisan products.”

Sustainability is another of the key points of focus for the project. Here, Mr Porta says artisan skills and sustainability are “consubstantial” and that the makers of artisan products and campaigners for sustainability “have the same way of understanding life”. Finally, another driver for the project will be a strategy for fomenting cultural tourism, in which visits to local artisans to see them working and get to know (and buy) their products will play what the KPMG partner calls a fundamental role.

International icons

Círculo Fortuny is enthusiastic in its support of these ideas and used the event in Madrid to echo KPMG’s calls for greater appreciation of the importance of artisan manufacture and investment in its future. And in addition to presenting a series of ‘master artisan’ awards, it claimed the date, May 11, as High Craftsmanship Day. President of the luxury industry body, Xandra Falcó, says she was delighted that Spain’s national fine arts academy, the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, was able to host the event. “This is the home of artisan work in Spain,” she told the audience. “In 1773, King Philip VI turned this building into a school for teaching crafts that have art at their centre and excellence as their objective. Goya and Picasso are among the people who learned their trade in these rooms.”

She is proud of Círculo Fortuny, which her father, Carlos Falcó, the Marquis of Griñón, founded in 2011 (on May 11). He named the organisation after another famous painter (and photographer and designer), Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo, who was born in Granada in 1871 (on May 11). Its membership now comprises 67 high-end brands and institutions from all parts of Spain, including leathergoods brand Loewe, footwear brand Magnanni and interior design and furniture brand Gastón y Daniela. Wine producers, jewellery manufacturers, porcelain producers and even a number of exclusive hotels and resorts are members, too. “They are firms and institutions whose creativity has made them into international icons,” the organisation’s president says.

She is proud, too, of Círculo Fortuny’s membership of ECCIA, the European Cultural and Creative Industries Alliance. This wider group is made up of Comité Colbert from France, Walpole from the UK, Meisterkreis from Germany, Altagamma from Italy and Gustaf III Kommitté from Sweden, as well as the Spanish organisation. Together, ECCIA members represent more than 600 high-end brands and institutions. The luxury sector is of great relevance in Europe, Xandra Falcó insists, because it accounts for 4% of Europe’s gross domestic product and 10% of its export revenues. European luxury represents 72% of the turnover of high-end brands and services worldwide, with combined annual revenues of €800 billion.

Turning her focus back to Spain in particular, she continues: “Our brands, the members of Círculo Fortuny, all have their roots in the hands of an artisan, someone who started out in a small workshop, studio or vineyard. Those artisans used their hands to give shape to extraordinary products, often using centuries-old techniques to do so. Their products have stood the test of time; they represent our cultural heritage.” But she goes on to warn that many of these trades are now at risk of disappearing. One reason is that many of the companies involved are unable to hand over to new generations of artisans because of a lack of recruits, meaning it could soon become impossible for them to continue to manufacture their products on home soil, using time-honoured techniques and traditional raw materials.

Meaningful employment

Luxury group LVMH, the parent company of Círculo Fortuny member Loewe, has been aware of these challenges for some time. An initiative it has set up called Métiers d’Excellence is running for the eighth year in succession in 2022. This concept, whose name translates as ‘Professions of Excellence’, consists of a series of events at which artisans from the group’s many brands present their trades to young people as routes to meaningful, long-term employment. The early part of the 2022 programme included live demonstrations and information sessions in five French cities in March and April. When the dust from this settled, LVMH’s development director for Métiers d’Excellence, Alexandre Boquel, travelled to Madrid to take part in the presentation event for the KPMG study, the awards and the launch of the new Spanish project.

Mr Boquel calculates that France could be losing as many as 10,000 experienced artisans each year, and LVMH itself says it would like to recruit 1,200 new-generation craftspeople. Entire professions can fade away, he warns, something that he calls a catastrophe because “losing these professions is to lose a part of your identity”. He believes that a key aspect of reversing this should be building up contacts with schools and working as directly as possible with young people aged 12 or 13. “They don’t know what craft is,” he explains. “If you ask typical young people of that age how many professions they can name, they often can’t think of more than seven, and two of those are likely to be ‘footballer’ and ‘Instagram influencer’. In the world of craft alone, we have 300 different professions.”

Shine a light

Commissioning the KPMG study, launching the ‘master artisan’ awards and the new project are all initiatives that have the same objective as LVMH’s in running the Métiers d’Excellence. Círculo Fortuny says it wants to shine a new light on artisan workers and on their traditional skills. “Our aim is to give them their visibility back,” Xandra Falcó says, “to build their prestige back up, help them build up their design capacity and their business management skills, attract new talent, create products that will prove attractive to the most exacting international customers, all while creating much-needed employment in parts of the country that are becoming depopulated.”

On this point, Alexandre Boquel says he thinks the “eco-systems for forming new artisans” have become too complex. “What younger recruits need,” he explains, “is accompaniment and orientation so that they can find for themselves the best ways to learn.” Craft goes beyond manuals and instructions, he insists; it is something that is in the DNA of all luxury brands. These brands, household names today, are seldom the result of business people coming up with an idea and taking it to market. He says Loewe is a good example of what usually happens. The name of an entrepreneur from Germany was the one the company adopted at its formal launch in 1846 [it is the oldest leathergoods brand in the LVMH group], but this was only possible, Mr Boquel explains, because Enrique (Heinrich) Loewe met and was welcomed among a group of already active, skilled leather artisans in Madrid.

Alexandre Boquel joined the luxury group 20 years ago and says now that, with an engineering background, he had little consciousness at the time of the importance of craft. “The first trip I made in my new role was to Loewe’s factory in Getafe, near Madrid,” he says. “I will always remember that one of the first things that happened that day was that the people working there invited me to feel the leather they were using. I could see how passionate they were about what they were doing, and they were able to pass their passion on to me.”

He says this experience allowed him to feel why craft is so important, leaving him to conclude that craft brings uniqueness, creativity and a high level of value to high-end brands. Crafts and skills can and must evolve, he adds, but they need protecting. “Without craftsmanship, no brand, not Louis Vuitton, not Loewe, would have anywhere to go,” he concludes.

Sustainable by definition

Xandra Falcó explains that the aim of the new project is to help artisan operators old and new survive, thrive and be companies that Spain can be proud of in the future. Objects created by master artisans have what she calls “an aura”. These objects are imbued with emotion and passion, she continues, “capable of transmitting unique sensations and the particular landscapes of the places they come from in a way that industrially produced objects will never be able to achieve”. Handcrafted objects of this kind, she adds, are sustainable by definition because makers want their products to endure for as long possible.

“We want this project to make an enormous difference,” the Círculo Fortuny president insists. “We know providing our high craftsmanship with the protection it needs is a huge task and we would like institutions and individuals everywhere to add their weight to it.”

Glass ceiling

A fellow member of the organisation’s board, Fernando Caruncho, a designer of gardens of worldwide renown, is in no doubt that the biggest change the project needs to bring about is in the field of training and education. He heads up the Círculo Fortuny’s commission for new talent. The need is urgent, he argues, for education departments, at central, regional and provincial government level to provide training and qualifications for young people who want to work with their hands and help preserve the skills and artisan traditions of their forebears. Far too much of the authorities’ focus is on ushering young people straight from high school into undergraduate degrees, in a country where unemployment rates among the under-25s was consistently above 40% in 2020 and was still at 28.9% in April 2022.

“There is a glass ceiling between these two educational worlds,” Mr Caruncho insists, “and we have to make it disappear once and for all, giving craftsmanship its true value. Craftsmanship is about producing things that are beyond beautiful.” What he means by this is that some objects are useful and some are beautiful, but it is also possible, even in 2022, to find products, of which artisan shoes and bags and other things made from leather are good examples, that are useful and beautiful at the same time. Leather can even confer on them the amazing ability to become even more beautiful as time goes by. “When what is beautiful is useful, and what is useful is beautiful,” Mr Caruncho concludes, “what you have is an object that is sublime.”

Círculo Fortuny president, Xandra Falcó, at the event in the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid at which she launched a new project to preserve artisan skills in Spain.
Credit: Círculo Fortuny

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