It started with an eighty pound T-shirt.
A Manchester made T-shirt worn by Andy Burnham was mocked for its price. But the price was never the real story. What it cost to make one, line by line, was.
The making was never the problem. The arithmetic was.
Eighty pounds for a T-shirt looks absurd until you price one. Then it looks like exactly what it is, which is what happens when a country spends thirty years moving its volume somewhere else and then asks why the few remaining makers cannot match the price of the places it moved it to.
Clothes2order has already tried this alone. We worked with English Fine Cottons, at real cost, on a genuine attempt to make a British T-shirt that could compete. It did not work, and we can explain precisely why in numbers. Nobody had trouble making it. The problem was that one buyer, ordering alone, cannot put enough volume through a line to bring the cost per unit anywhere near the imported alternative.
Volume built the mills the first time, and only volume will do it again. No single brand has enough of it. A group of them might.
So the offer was made publicly, in the comments of a post about that eighty pound T-shirt: if manufacturers and buyers wanted to form a consortium and try this properly, together, count us in. One hundred and fifty eight comments later, this is what came of it.
One garment. One specification. One date.
Not a campaign, not a trade body, and not a manifesto. One crew neck T-shirt, one agreed specification, knitted, dyed, cut, sewn and finished in the United Kingdom, with enough combined volume behind it to be worth a factory's while.
If one garment can be made brilliantly in Britain, at volume, at a price that competes, the same model extends to others. That is a conversation for after the first run, not before it.
Who is behind this, and why
The Clothing Consortium is convened by Michael Conway, Chairman of Clothes2order, a Manchester business that has printed and embroidered clothing for twenty nine years. Clothes2order is a founding member. It buys blanks by the container, most of them made abroad, and it would like to buy more of them here.
That is a commercial interest and it is worth stating plainly. A consortium convened by a buyer only works if the manufacturers in it do well, because a supplier that cannot make money will not be there next year. This helps his business only if it helps yours.
The consortium is being run as a project with published dates and a published result, not as a business owned by any one member. Legal structure is deliberately undecided. For the first six months this runs as an unincorporated project. If the founding group wants a permanent body, whether a company, a cooperative or a trade society, the founding members will choose it together rather than inherit it.
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.
We will report back publicly in February 2027, including if it does not work.