The Clothing Consortium
A UK manufacturing project 200 gsm / one specification Founding intake closes 31.10.2026

One T-shirt. Made in Britain.

The fabric producers, the dye houses and the manufacturers are still here, but an established supply chain is not. A group of manufacturers, distributors and buyers can fix that.

Starting with one T-shirt design, one specification, with the objective of bringing more clothing manufacturing back to the UK.

Register interestRead the plan
Specification, phase oneRev 01
GarmentCrew neck T-shirt
Weight200 gsm
Knit, dye, finishUnited Kingdom
Cut and sewUnited Kingdom
YarnImported, phase one
Volume tiers10k / 50k / 250k / 1m
Landed costPublished Nov 2026
Stock held byOpen question
Two lines on this sheet are unanswered. Answering them in public, with the workings shown, is the whole point of the project.
01 / Manufacturers

One spec, not one hundred enquiries

One set up, one fabric, predictable runs, and machines that are not idle between orders. The buyers and the decorators who sell to the end customer are in this group, which is the part most UK manufacturers lack.

Register capacity
02 / Brands and buyers

Provenance that survives scrutiny

If you buy against a forward schedule, a uniform programme or a public tender, you are the most valuable member of this group. An order placed ahead of production removes the largest single barrier to making it here.

Register demand
03 / Distributors and funders

The essential link in the chain

Between the factory and the buyer sits the party who holds the garment, and that is a trade in its own right. Distributors, wholesalers and the people who finance them are how volume actually reaches a customer. We want them in the founding group from the start.

Talk to us

Where this is going

A project with published dates and a published result, not an organisation with a constitution. We will report back in February either way, including if it does not work.

By 31.10.2026
Founding intake closes. Manufacturers, buyers, distributors and funders registered and screened.
November 2026
Founding meeting, Manchester or Leicester. Cost model, funding model, specification, commitments.
November 2026
Both models published in full, at four volume tiers, against the imported benchmark. Nobody has published either.
Early 2027
First production run placed, sold before it is made.
February 2027
Public report on what worked and what did not.
Full disclosure

What we are not claiming

UK cotton spinning has effectively gone. English Fine Cottons stopped spinning after its parent company entered administration, and the name now operates as a brand. So phase one is knitted, dyed, cut, sewn and finished in the UK, with imported yarn. That is an honest description of what is possible today, and rebuilding the earlier stages of the chain is what volume is for.

We would rather say that ourselves than have somebody else point it out. A provenance claim that does not survive a journalist is worse than no claim at all.