Ep. 129: UKFT on the importance of trade shows

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Ep. 129: UKFT on the importance of trade shows

WTiN Textile Innovation Podcast speaks to Paul Alger MBE, director of international affairs at UKFT, in a two part special.

WTiN: Hello and welcome to Textile Innovation, hosted by WTiN. My name is Abi and I'm the Features Editor and your podcast host. Each month we will be joined by a special guest. So join me and my colleagues as we deep dive into what's new, what's interesting and what immiscible innovations have hit the market recently.  We cover everything on the podcast, from sustainability to startups and the latest research and development. Plus we quiz the experts in the field about their products and ideas across the huge spectrum that is the textile industry. So no matter what you're interested in, WTiN have you covered and we can connect you to everything you need to know right here from our central hub in the UK. We have something quite special for you this week.

This is the first episode in a two-part special with the UK Fashion and Textile Association. During the two episodes, I am joined by Paul Algar, Director of International Business Development at UKFT. In this first episode of our two-part special, Paul delves into the work of UKFT, how he works in the business, and he deep dives into the opportunities and challenges within the industry. In regard to opportunities in particular, Paul outlines the importance of trade shows and speaks about which markets are making waves on the global stage.

Hi Paul, thank you for joining me on WTAN's Textile Innovation Podcast. Please could you tell me about your background and work within UKFT?

Alger: Thanks Abi, it's great to see you. Yep, so I have worked for what is now the UK Fashion and Textile Association for what is effectively 36 years. I can't quite believe that I've been here this long. I came in to buy a pint of milk and 36 years later, I'm still here. At the moment, I'm Director of International Business for UK Fashion and Textile Association. And my main role, I I suppose is to help guide fashion and textile companies through exports although we also get involved in other parts of international trade and another part of that which I know we'll talk about is sort of helping government to understand what businesses need to export, what businesses need to trade efficiently and sustainably both in the UK and overseas. So my remit is broadly international in focus but does include quite a lot of UK content particularly when we're talking to government.

WTiN: Can you tell me currently what the international trade market looks like? Who do you believe are the biggest players and who do you believe you have to keep your eye on?

Alger: It's a really good question Abi. I say the situation is complex and evolving. I guess you probably expected that I would say that, that's what everybody says, but I think it's also worth saying that it's different for fashion and textiles. So fashion businesses increasingly are working on a fashion hybrid of B2C and B2B with B2C thrown in so you know we're selling fashion companies, fashion brands are selling to wholesale customers if they can but they're also selling direct to customers around the world from their own websites through marketplaces they're engaging with them on social media for example. Textile companies traditionally a little bit more B2B more business to business selling to manufacturers in particular but we're also seeing in areas of say for example technical textiles that technical textiles can be sold to other manufacturers but they can also be sold to governments for example if you're looking at public procurement and again I'm sure we'll talk about issues around public procurement level playing field you know MOD, defence spending for example, those are different ways of selling goods. I suppose in the area of who do we have to have our eye on, Italy is probably the one to beat in most market segments that we look at. I think we also need to keep an eye on Korea for technical textiles because we know that the Koreans have ambitions, let's call them, to really move into and to protect their own technical textile industry. They're not the only ones. The Chinese are obviously very advanced in that space as well. The Chinese are probably the ones to beat in that space. And then again, back in the heritage textile area, I mentioned Italy, but also Turkey is very important in that space as well. And of course, again, as I'm sure we'll say later, Italy and Turkey are two countries that do an amazing job of supporting financially their businesses to export. So they are the ones that keep me awake at night.

WTiN: Thank you Paul for explaining that. Could you please tell me where you see some of the biggest opportunities in the UK? Where are the discussions happening at the moment?

Alger: Often trade shows and market visits are key for us. That hasn't really changed although we thought it might do after Covid. People still want to look and see and feel textiles and fashion. They want to be able to go into an exhibition hall and see what is selling and what's not. That sort of that old adage that you can go into a trade show and see what your competitors are doing is is as true now as it ever has been. Although there are fewer trade shows and they are more concentrated than they used to be.

But trade shows and trade missions and our own network, I would say, UKFT has spent quite a lot of time over the last five or six years developing its network. So agents, distributors, those people that are not necessarily the buyers because no buyer ever wants to be on a trade association's mailing list, but we do work with international agents and distributors who are in personal contact with buyers. And that gives us the ability to identify what's coming up, what's going down, which companies are paying their bills, which ones are not and so trade shows and visits are still a very important part of that.

WTiN: You've just touched upon my next question but could you tell me a bit more about how UKFT supports the fashion and textile industry within this changing environment, obviously specifically to the UK?

Alger: Sure, absolutely. So, I mean, fashion companies that we work with, and I've spent probably the largest part of my time in the last 36 years working with small designers, setting up small businesses, small brands, you know, small brands become big ones. Paul Smith and Vivi Westwood started off as small businesses way back in the day and we took them to key trade shows and now look at them, they're amazing international businesses that are coincidentally based in the UK. So fashion companies will tend to look a lot at trade shows, working with our international network. I mentioned agents and distributors but there's also when we go to Paris Fashion Week, there is a really interesting network of multi-brand independent shows and showrooms that you care to work with as part of our Paris Fashion Week work for men's or women's, which is important and sometimes we also work with government where we think that government can provide something that is useful to business. More often than not we look to them for money and sometimes for contacts through our embassies and consulates. But I suppose the majority of the work for us on the fashion side is helping companies to avoid costly mistakes and to get their first breaks because many of them think that the department stores are going to be their first customers. Well, sadly in the UK, we don't have that many independent retailers left.

So therefore they have to look overseas and that's why within the first few seasons, couple of seasons, we often find that fashion designers come to UKFT and say, can you help us to identify a route to market? Can you help us to understand which trade to market, can you help us to understand which trade shows will be right for our collection or whether it's another route to market or whether there's an agent or a distributor if they're a member that we can connect with. For textile companies trade shows are still part of globalizing the route to market for B2B manufacturers. We take groups to Milan Unica, for example, which is now the leading heritage textile fair with getting on for something in the region of 25 to 30 UK brands showing every season. There's a really strong relationship between the UK and the Italian manufacturing industries. We don't compete with them. They don't really compete with us.

We have the same challenges, but you also have the same opportunities. And so the Italians quite like us at the moment, and that's wonderful because as an Italian speaker we like to be doing things with Italy wherever we can. We go to Premier Vision Paris, a smaller event than it used to be but still very important, particularly if we're looking at the future of textiles and where that may go. Textile innovation, for example, which is a very important part of the work that UKFT does. We look at newer markets, so for example, we're showing again later this year for the second or third time, I think it is now, an inter-textile Shanghai. Selling to China is not easy. It's a challenge. The UK-China relationship is not easy. But with textile business, you're always looking to see where are the manufacturers. And China, whether we like it or not, is still a very, very important part of that. Looking to new markets, Viet in Vietnam, UKFT took a small group of companies to the first show. We don't always trailblaze, but we decided it was right for us to go to Viet in Vietnam earlier this year. My colleague, Dan, who heads up a lot of our textile trade show work, Dan Connolly will be known to many people, has just come back from a fabric affair and PV New York where we've been working with social media support around some of those companies that were there just to see how they have done. The United States is an important market, the UK-US relationship is important, complicated of course with the tariffs and we'll talk about those I'm sure, but we also go to markets and take part with support from cloth workers who support all of our textile program, the Worshipful Company of Cloth Workers who are dear supporters of UKFT's textile program to events like JITAC in Japan, for example, which is where all of the key Japanese agents come together, show their collections. There's a big UK presence there. Chicago Collective, even, which is a menswear show, which has quite an interesting selection of UK textile houses who are going there to target in-house tailoring in some of the United States smaller independent stores. So Holland and Sherry and Scabal for example are regulars there. And then looking into next year, to save you asking the question, we're sort of looking at what does the new UK-India trade agreement mean for UK companies, whether there are opportunities for us to particularly sell into the Indian manufacturing industry, both at the higher end, but also on the in-house tailoring side. So we're currently looking to understand what the rules of origin of that agreement will be when they are published. We haven't seen them yet, but we understand they're on their way. So once we've understood the rules of origin of that agreement and how easy or not it will be for UK companies to sell UK manufactured textiles into India on preferential basis, whether that will include, whether that will mean that everything that comes out of the UK is preferential, or whether it means that only textiles woven in the UK of UK yarn because we haven't seen those rules yet. Once we've decided on that we'll make a decision as to whether we go to Baratex for example in 2016. So quite a lot of activity.

WTiN: And that's really fascinating hearing about that. And it will be really interesting to see what comes out of the UK India trade agreement. I look forward to what you publish on that.

WTiN: And what opportunities do you see for the industry? Like for example, have you heard anything or seen anything exciting at recent trade shows?

Alger: It's always good to have a positive outlook and we speak a lot about the challenges. I think every other sentence that I start nowadays, oh the challenge is this, the challenge is that. Yes, there are plenty of challenges around the world, but with every challenge comes an opportunity, an opportunity to do something better, an opportunity, I would say, in the UK to actually build a better business, to build better environment for business. So you asked me earlier on about the relationship with government. UKFT has been challenging and will continue to challenge the government about looking at why the UK is a more difficult, more expensive place to do business, why it's more expensive to manufacture here than elsewhere, because we believe that we can create a better environment. We believe that UK Textiles and our fashion designers together are an amazing source of national pride, that they have the potential to make a real difference in creating a greener and more sustainable fashion and textile industry. So that's all very positive. The challenge, there's that word again, is how do we get government to be radical enough to address those issues? Now, Great British Energy, for example, is a start.

Will it move quickly enough? Will it move effectively enough to actually make a difference? We saw in the industrial strategy some of those references that UKFT has been pushing for, so for example a commitment to join the pan-European agreement on accumulation, an agreement to look at extending cheaper, more flexible energy to manufacturing on the back of our applied engineering, applied manufacturing agenda. So that's beginning to come through, but will it happen quick enough? I would say again, other opportunities, there is an opportunity here for the UK to, certainly under this government I would say, and it has a narrow window to do so but to reconnect in the way that it is already reconnecting with the European Union and doing a better deal than the one that we have at the moment. This government has already demonstrated that it is willing to to a certain degree put the politics to one side which is which is important and actually listen to our European partners who are both our closest consumers but also our closest near shore friendly suppliers and natural suppliers for a lot of our companies. So sitting down understanding what their problems are, what our problems are and then coming up with solutions which satisfy both. I think there is a very narrow but nonetheless an important window for the UK and EU to get around the table and to do a business agreement that doesn't negate the results of the referendum. That's not what anybody's talking about here but that makes Brexit work for Britain and there is no reason why it couldn't if the right approach and the right policies are put in place and at the same time we have the potential to to do better trade agreements not just with the EU but with other countries around the world. That's the challenge again I'm afraid that word back. We are a number of the UK's free trade agreements or trade agreements as we call them here came into effect immediately on the back of Brexit and they were concluded in some haste and they included some sunset agreements on EU accumulation and I'm sorry if that's a bit of a complex term but emulation is a part of the world that we live in because we don't produce for example a lot of yarn there aren't that many dye houses in the UK so inevitably a lot of UK manufacturers, the proudest UK manufacturers often have to resort to leather or yarn or wool that's come from somewhere else. We don't produce these things and that's where it always gets rather confusing when we're talking about trade agreements because the trade agreement will say 95% of goods will be duty-free. What they forget to tell you is that 95% of goods will be duty-free if they meet the rules of origin and so often as we have seen the UK because of our complex global supply chain doesn't always often more often than not doesn't meet the rules of origin so that's that is a challenge and we will see I'm sure that we will see that when those sunset agreements are renegotiated so we're going through Canada very famously, stepped away from the table, the UK is working with Korea at the moment, those agreements will look different, so there will be different questions around what is going to be in the rules of origin that will affect businesses. We don't know that what those are yet, but if those renegotiations go well then there should be better market access for companies manufacturing in the UK for those countries. And just kind of coming off that as well, what do you believe the industry should be investing in like should it be AI or circularity for example and they seem to be two hot topics at the moment. Circularity is here to stay, it's not going to. Circularity is here to stay. It's not going to go away. Consumers are going to expect it, and governments are increasingly regulating to make sure that it happens. The question around circularity is going to be who pays for it.

And there is going to be a healthy debate, I suspect, before long between industry that wants to satisfy consumers demands for cheap products which may not be sustainable for the longer term and consumers who want everything cheaper and want industry to pay for that circularity and those two divergent trajectories if you like are going to at some stage need to be addressed and inevitably consumers will end up paying a higher price. Part of that conversation is going to be for industry to explain to consumers and retailers why it is that a five pound t-shirt or two t-shirts for less than a fiver is not sustainable. Consumers, whenever we speak to consumers and you will know this and everybody else says the same thing, you ask consumers what it was that they would like to see in circularity and they want it to be this, they want it to to be that, they wanted to be longer live, they wanted to be cheaper. Those things are mutually exclusive and so at a certain point we're going to have to have a conversation with ourselves as an industry but also as a group of consumers as to what we want our fashion to be doing moving forward. In terms of investment, I would say there are a number of different things. I think UK companies certainly are going to have to look to invest more in getting goods sold because my concern is that a lot of our companies have been beaten down over the years and have always have reduced their sales teams to the point that they can't really concentrate on anything unless it's immediately apparent where it's going to take them and which order it's going to lead to. Actually for the longer term for those newer markets that we were talking about earlier on like the Middle East like India like China like for example, and even the United States and Europe closer to home, a longer term approach is going to be needed. So we talk a lot at UKFT about sort of getting it made of apprenticeships and raising the standards and making sure that companies have access to the right quality materials, for example. But as a country, we don't always concentrate as much as we should do on the getting it sold.

And as I always say to my colleagues at UKFT, if designers and mills can't get it sold, they won't bother to make it. It's a simple fact of life. These are business commercial decisions. So getting it sold, allocating more budget and resource to identify new markets and new opportunities is critical. AI has a very important role to play in that respect because you can do quite a lot of desk research nowadays without even spending too much money in AI. There is a plethora of AI platforms and solutions out there for every possible product problem both real and imagined. So it's probably too early for me to be saying that UKFT is going to get involved with this one or that one. We will watch very very carefully. UKIPTI has an innovation partnership scheme where we are beginning to look at those innovation partners, AI and others that have something real and tangible to offer the industry. One of the challenges, but also one of the opportunities of working for a National Trade Association with a Royal President is you have to take your duty of care very seriously and you have to be absolutely sure of the advice that you're giving. So trade associations such as UKFT will always be very reluctant to get involved in new technologies until we've understood that they address and provide responses to real problems in a realistic and business-friendly way. So without making too many excuses, UKFT has been quite slow to come to this space, but we are beginning to identify some of those resources that we think six, 12 months down the line could potentially be beneficial and solve real time problems for the fashion and textile industry and some of them.

Have the potential to be revolutionary this revolution I don't use the word lightly the ability to use your camera to identify where something has been made or what the fibre composition is, is revolutionary. It empowers consumers to ask questions which they couldn't ask before. The question then becomes what's the benefit to the consumer and what's the benefit to the industry and I think it's that bit of it that's still missing and also who's going to pay for it because if a manufacturer pays for it inevitably the consumer will end up paying for it too. So these are all questions but I think the biggest change that I've seen in the last 18 months is slightly shifting attitudes amongst some of the UK's international trading partners about the definition of investment. Some of our companies have done incredibly well at getting investment from overseas or from other businesses into their mills and others have, you know, family-run businesses in particular are investing time and energy to get the product right. But increasingly what we're seeing in markets like Japan, and I suspect Korea will be similar, is that the retailers and the partners there are going to be increasingly look to see what other types of investment UK businesses are willing to make in getting their collections and their products in front of consumers. And I think that is an area where investment is sometimes slow from the UK, could be faster. Again, it's one of the reasons why UKFT talks very closely to government about the British Business Bank and the opportunities to do more both through the British Business Bank and UK Export Finance, for example to make it easier for UK companies to weather the financial risk of some of these transactions. But I would say AI has a place moving down and I have certainly on a personal level found that it's quite good at answering questions to which I already know the answers but where I can find and you will know this as a journalist, you know, if you know your topic and you know the answers, but you want to know where the sources are, and if you ask it the right questions in the right way, it will come up with some sometimes quite plausible answers. If it doesn't know the answers to your questions, it will make them up. And that's a challenge that we all have to be very aware of. So AI is both an opportunity and a threat. And if I was having this conversation with a designer, designers feel very threatened by AI because it has the potential to steal their ideas. So the opportunity of AI is there, but so are the risks, and the risks in many ways are much more difficult to quantify because we just don't know what it's going to do yet. None of us does, but certainly if your copyrights can be stolen, if your text can be stolen, for example, as a journalist you will understand this, you know, that becomes a problem and it becomes a problem, it can become a problem very quickly. I'd say, yes, an opportunity in AI, but very, the risks and the threats are going to be uppermost in a lot of people's minds as they move forward. And as we have discovered in our rush towards fast fashion, fast fashion and AI are probably similar in this respect. The opportunities to do things quicker and cheaper are there, but they come with a cost. So at the same time that you are consulting AI on certain things, you are also potentially instructing it to do things that maybe you don't necessarily always want it to be able to do.

WTiN: Thank you, Paul. At the beginning of the podcast, I asked you what the international trade market for textile looks like today. And now, to be fair, after hearing everything, I think it's going to be a really difficult question to answer. But looking to the future, how do you predict this may change in coming years?

Alger: I mean I think there is an opportunity to make a better industry in the UK. Now some of us would say it couldn't get much worse and that is a statement that I may or may not agree with but there is certainly the potential for industry and government to work much more closely together to understand why the UK isn't performing in the way that perhaps it could where I would say we are probably working at below our potential in some of those areas and there are some opportunities we could look for.

I think we do need to be looking at the UK's relationship with the rest of the world, particularly the EU, but other countries like the United States, Canada for example, the Gulf, the Middle East, India, very tropical at the moment. Looking at those reasons why British retail is in the state that it is in, I think that is an opportunity that this government absolutely needs to look at. There's the opportunity, there's the chance to look at how do we the opportunity, there's the chance to look at how do we create a level playing field for British companies? That was one of the potential benefits that was always flagged by the Brexiters when they were campaigning, that the UK could have a look again at public procurement and the rules that sort of make it easier for UK companies to supply the domestic market. Now, the Chinese government doesn't look to other countries to provide military uniforms and textiles for its military. Why does the UK not sort of learn from that? So again, I mentioned before the work that we're doing with government, the UK is looking at what other countries like for example the United States has what's called the Berry Amendment which makes it easier for small and medium businesses in the US to access some of those defence contracts. Well the UK could do that too and we're talking to government about that. And I think the other thing is obviously as and here we are in 2025 there's also the opportunity to do more on that sort of ally-shoring, friend-shoring agenda which gets forgotten quite a lot and recent events in the United States have made that feel a little bit further down the line. But I genuinely think that there is a potential there for the United States, Canada, Europe, Japan, Korea and Australia, New Zealand to do a lot more trade together because actually we share common values and common interests. So I think we can do a lot more there.

WTiN: Thank you for listening to the first episode in our two-part special with Paul Algar. During this episode Paul has spoken about the work of UKFT and market opportunities. Join us in two weeks’ time for the second instalment where Paul and I speak about international trade with sharp focus on exports.