The Clothing Consortium brings UK manufacturers and the brands that buy from them together, behind one goal: enough committed volume to make a British-made T-shirt genuinely competitive. The machines, the people and the skills already exist. Starting with T-shirts. Growing across the trade.
When a Manchester-made T-shirt was mocked in the press for costing £80, the real story got lost. UK manufacturers can make excellent T-shirts today. The machines, the mills and the skills are still here. What is missing is volume. Without serious scale, a British T-shirt cannot get near the price of an imported one, and no single brand can build that volume alone. A group of us might. That is the entire premise of The Clothing Consortium.
Brands and buyers pledge order volume against one flagship UK-made T-shirt, giving manufacturers the demand certainty they need before investing in a shared production line.
UK mills, cutters and sewers, in Manchester, Leicester and beyond, register their capacity and skills against a single, shared specification, rather than competing for scraps of bespoke orders.
One exceptional T-shirt spec, agreed once and produced at real volume, proves the model before the Consortium expands into other garments.
Clothes2order tried this alone first. Working with English Fine Cottons, we produced a small run of a UK manufactured T-shirt in and around Manchester. The making was never the problem. The arithmetic was. Without serious volume there are no economies of scale, and the project could not get near the price of an imported T-shirt on its own. That trial is the reason The Clothing Consortium exists: this needs a group, not a single business.
No single business or brand can build that volume alone, but a group of us might.
We are starting with the largest, most fragmented garment category in the trade: the plain T-shirt. Prove that one garment can be made brilliantly, at volume, at a competitive price, and the same model extends into hoodies, workwear, embroidery blanks and wider promotional apparel.
Whether you manufacture garments in the UK or you buy them by the thousand, the founding intake is where you shape what gets made and how.
Join the Consortium