Utter fabrication

I met a weaver today, doing his thing in the Blackhouse Museum at An Gearrannan on the West Side (see, I left Stornoway!), and realised I have the facts about weaving completely tied around my neck. I said in the last posting that there were only two working weavers. There aren't, there are about 220. Where I got confused was in the relationship between them and the tweed *companies*, who take the finished cloth, and sell it as is, or turn it into garments and sell it. There are three such companies on Harris and Lewis, and they give all the materials to the weavers (who own their own looms) who create the tweed and then leave it on the doorstep for collection. The financial pinch is that the weavers are then tied to those three companies (which are not co-operatives, but separate private concerns), to the patterns they want, and to the prices they're prepared to pay. All the added value then goes to the companies who sell the tweed, with the weavers providing the raw materials.

So the comment about garment designers still goes. If there were a separate Island concern that was also a consumer of tweed, and someone to add value to it by making it up in situ (presumably employing local people to do so), and who could market it, more of a slice of the profits would stay on the island and could go to the weavers. So it's a bit like the situation with the vegetable and fruit growers and the big supermarkets - the Big Three hold a shared monopoly in the market, and there's no other outlet for the product - which means you have to stay on the right side.

Apologies for the mistake. I am realising I'd never make a journalist.