LINEN TRADE REVIVAL

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 798, 19 October 1929, Page 26

LINEN TRADE REVIVAL

EFFORTS IN SCOTLAND MODERN SALES METHODS The efforts of the Scottish linen manufacturers to restore their industry to prosperity seem to show that they have been heeding the Prince of Wales’s advice about scrapping old-fashioned methods and adopting modern salesmanship technique. Markets at Home and abroad have been studied, quality has been developed by the application of secretly evolved processes, the demand for colour has been met with a thoroughness that threatens to make the white tablecloth obsolete, and the best industrial artists and designers have been enlisted to introduce variations into the formal designs hitherto in use. All this is a costly business. The creation of facilities for weaving each new design costs £IOO. The scrapping of the out-of-date patterns represents a sacrifice of large sums. The Dunfermline manufacturers have had to struggle against‘the dominance of the name of Irish linen, -which has been so marked that the production of the older Scottish industry lias been sold as Irish in the home market. Scottish linen is now making its bid for a place in the markets on its own. The new designs are often fresh and original—pictures woven into linens of Scottish scenes and ships on the seas, family crests 'and symbols, willow patterns and historic events picked out in colours, produced by a process known only in the north. The industrial significance of all this is that it is the story of one of the oldest industries in the country starting again almost from the bottom in its manufacturing methods and pushing the results by enterprising salesmanship.