Westley Richards established its name making sporting guns for the elite of Victorian society. While the bespoke ethos of hand-made guns and rifles – costing tens, sometimes hundreds of thousands of pounds – is hard-wired into the company, the modern Westley Richards is also a powerful player in leather travel luggage and premium leisure bags.
The buzzwords on the lips of the current generation of luxury goods buyers are sustainability, ethical sourcing, local suppliers, hand-craft, traditional processes, individuality and a low carbon footprint. Artisan skills are once again appreciated and traditional methods of creating products are valued above machine-led, industrial ideas of perfection and uniformity.
To create its range of travel bags, ruck-sacks and professional leather goods, Westley Richards employs artisan cutters, stitchers and designers to plan and craft each piece to order from the finest hides in its Victorian factory in the heart of Birmingham. These are increasingly locally-procured, always traditionally tanned with bark extract, and constructed using age-old skills re-learned by a keen, young workforce.
Westley Richards stands firmly in the vanguard of the re-birth of Birmingham and the West Midlands as the future hub of British manufacturing. Once justly famed as the workshop of the world, the new priorities of the rising generation are fuelling its resurgence.
Craft industry, the inter-related dependency of one producer on the skills of local artisans and product suppliers, is the bedrock upon which Birmingham’s original prosperity was built in the 1860s. As the 21st century steams into its own Roaring Twenties, these models for business appear to have re-established their worth.
The Sutherland Safari Bag epitomizes the new culture. Hand-cut sheets of the luxurious, yet hardy, bark-dyed cow hides and rugged cotton canvas, combine to form a travel bag that is at once classic and modern, effortlessly portable and satisfying to heft. It is unmistakably British, unmistakably high quality and decidedly desirable.
Peaky Blinders may have directed the world’s eyes back onto Birmingham, but Westley Richards is determined to hold that attention.
westleyrichards.com
