The unpredictability of wholesale is another ongoing challenge. “We wrote an order from one customer for £80,000, which is great. Ten of those and suddenly you have a very nice business. But that £80,000 order could disappear, or turn into £200,000. So it’s hard to strategize.” Direct-to-consumer (DTC) offers more certainty. Over the past three years, Peregrine has grown DTC from 10% to 30% of revenue. But the channel cannot replace wholesale, because the factory depends on consistent volume. “We can’t just rely on e-commerce; it’s still quite seasonal,” Glover explains.
His ideal wholesale network is curated and intentional: “What you look for in a wholesale partner, to me, is financial security, and someone who can represent your brand in a nice way and tell that story to their community.” In an ideal world, he says, “I’d probably have 80 stockists, handpicking the best ones.”
Building a modern textile ecosystem
For Peregrine, the next chapter will hinge on carving out an even clearer position in the menswear landscape, where appreciation for provenance and natural fibers is steadily rising. The brand’s marketing leans into this, foregrounding local manufacturing, traceable materials and craftsmanship. This is reinforced by behind-the-scenes factory photography and worker profiles, placing the emphasis on the people behind the product.
Inheriting an eighth-generation business carries a particular kind of gravity. Glover speaks about the responsibility of being an employer, of keeping British manufacturing alive when the economics rarely stack up, and of honoring a lineage while running a viable modern company. That invisible pressure shapes nearly every decision.
A case in point: the brand has been gradually increasing the share of regeneratively farmed British wool in its collections over the past five years, working with a farmer in Kent who has 5,000 Romney sheep. A fully regenerative collection would make for a better marketing story, Glover acknowledges, but it would be commercially unworkable. “To use 100% regeneratively farmed Romney wool, we’d have to clean the whole factory down.” This, he says, is where the industry has fallen short in the past: making made in England capsule collections that are not viable at scale. “You’ve had this nice PR story, but you haven’t actually backed English manufacturing.”
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