The Business Gateway Connections Podcast for 27 October 2021 featured an interview with Simon Cotton, Chief Executive of Johnstons of Elgin.

Family-owned businesses are a crucial part of the Moray economy and the wide-ranging discussion with Simon covered topics as diverse as the history of the business, its future plans, operating the business in an environmentally-friendly fashion, the benefits of the Royal Warrant to Johnstons and Simon’s proudest moment with the company.

Johnstons of Elgin was established in 1797.

It is one of the last remaining vertical mills in the UK still processing raw cashmere and woollen fibres right through to the finished product.

In the centuries since its formation, the company has been owned by just two families – the Johnstons and Harrisons. Current chairman, Jenny Urquhart, is the great granddaughter of former Johnstons’ owner, Freddie Harrison.

Johnstons export to 65 countries.

It has employees at its mills in Elgin and in Hawick.

In 2013, it was granted the Royal Warrant by the Prince of Wales for the manufacture and supply of estate tweed cloth to the Royal Household.

Johnstons is still in its original location in Elgin, on the banks of the River Lossie.

The meandering river forms 3 sides of the business’s site.

In 1851, the company was experimenting with wild fibres from around the world. Among those was “discovery” of cashmere for weaving and the development of the mechanical processing.

Simon Cotton says that, if you love working in the textiles industry – as he does – then being chief executive of Johnstons is akin to getting the keys to Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory.

Johnstons is in the top 3 of the oldest family businesses in Scotland.

As Simon points out: “Everyone thinks that 200-year-old companies are a bit “dusty”, but the reality is that, to survive two hundred years, you have to be able to change.”

After all this time, Johnstons are still innovating. There is constant external pressure to innovate but Johnstons aim to produce ‘timeless pieces’ rather than short-lived single-season successes. Simon considers that the Johnstons brand is growing in self-confidence and finding it easier to express its true personality – an authentic expression of the craftsmanship that goes into the products.

Johnstons are working much more closely with some of the biggest brands in the world. They are developing their China-based business. The Japanese market has been extremely strong as well.

Johnstons does not regard itself as a “large” employer.

One of their values is “community”.

They have a “small business” ethos. They try to avoid bureaucracy. They are small enough that it can be possible for employees to make decisions in their own areas of work.

They are large enough to have clout, for example, when discussing sustainability issues with chemical suppliers. But they are small enough to innovate easily.

At the beginning of the pandemic Lockdown, Johnstons had all except about 20 people on furlough.

The market has been turbulent. Retailers whose shops were closed were – understandably – not wanting to buy new product. On the other hand, some markets became buoyant. Others remained very quiet.

It was, and continues to be, a huge confidence-booster that they can knit and weave such a wide range of products – socks to scarves to coats to knitwear – and do it all in-house.

Johnstons are now going ‘full on’ to encompass all aspects of sustainable management and growth.

Johnstons were recently awarded the Queen’s Award for Enterprise in the Sustainable Development category.

It’s not just about reducing carbon emissions, though they have reduced those by 53%. It extends to looking at ways to take the use of hazardous chemicals out of the textiles industry.

Furthermore, it’s about how you treat your staff. Johnstons is a Living Wage Employer. (Increasingly, this is an important issue, across Moray).

It’s also about widening the net to examine how those suppliers they deal with from places as far away as Mongolia and Australia operate in producing the raw wool and cashmere. For example, the company is training children in Mongolia – the herders of the future – in sustainable grassland management. This aligns with Johnstons’ value of ‘community’ – really, just taking a slightly broader view of what ‘community’ means in practice.

What does Simon Cotton know now that he wished he had known at the beginning of his career?

He says that it’s remarkable how common the basic challenges are across all sorts of different businesses.

He wishes he had realised sooner that ‘it’s okay to be yourself. That you don’t have to conform to a stereotype. You don’t have to behave in a way that’s different to how you would naturally behave. You can and should bring your open, honest self to everything you do at work.

You should not be afraid to display vulnerability. It should be okay to say when you’re ‘having a bad day’.

No two people will ‘lead’ in exactly the same way. According to Simon, “we’re all leaders”. When you were in the cot and demanding to be fed, you were already ‘leading’ – or at least influencing!

We all do it but everyone does it in a slightly different way. At work, you’re applying these skills you’ve always had but just in a different context. It’s not necessary to artificially ‘be someone else’ in any leadership role.

Simon Cotton says his proudest moment with Johnstons was when it became a Living Wage Employer.

To his mind, the public had always viewed textiles as a ‘low wage’ industry.

Yet it’s a highly-skilled, luxury-goods industry. Scotland is one of the leading players in the world.

Johnstons have more than 100 employees who each have more than 20 years’ service. They like the community atmosphere and take pride and pleasure in the work that they do.

Does having the Royal Warrant give Johnstons an advantage over their competitors?

Johnstons know they are making the best product they can possibly make, in all circumstances.

But, for the average consumer, it’s not easy to differentiate why Johnstons’ goods are more expensive than some other apparently similar products.

Consumer trust can be built up over time but consumers also need more ‘instant’ reasons to believe that that quality is present. Johnstons ‘help themselves’ in that process by telling their story, highlighting the craftsmanship and opening up the mill to visitors. They’ve had 200,000 visitors a year in Elgin. These visitors ‘get it’ when they see the set-up.

But, Simon agrees, you also need ‘shortcuts’ to trust and proof of quality such as the Royal Warrant. The ‘certification’ is a powerful tool. No label is more respected than the Royal Warrant: being suppliers to the Royal Family.

You can visit Johnstons of Elgin.

Find them – the Mill, Shop and Weavers’ Restaurant at Newmill, Elgin.

All photos by Johnstons of Elgin via Unsplash

When Facebook suffered an unexpected outage on 04 October 2021, it highlighted to many businesses how integral the platform – and its associated apps – was to their day-to-day operations.

Facebook, in their update following the outage, recognised the impact outages like these have on the millions of businesses that use their services to find and reach customers, from Moray to Mongolia.

Their communication began: “To all the people and businesses around the world who depend on us…”

“Depend” is a strong word.

Making your business dependent on something you do not control is a bad idea.

It could be on the physical level, such as renting premises and finding that, when the lease comes up for renewal, your landlord wants to double or triple your rent, which you cannot afford and that’s the end of your business.

Or, on a digital level, it could be relying too much on platforms outwith your control, such as Facebook or YouTube. If the rules change – and they usually do without warning – you can suddenly have a business headache on top of all the other usual hassles that come with the territory. And this problem cannot be fixed by you using your own powers alone.

Anybody can create content on Facebook.

But the material you create then belongs to Facebook.

As we produce more and more content for Facebook for free, the more the value of Facebook increases. We work, they profit.

In the online sphere, this sort of practice has come to be known as digital sharecropping.

Sharecropping is a method of farming where tenant farmers cultivate their land and give a part of each crop as their rent. The landlord owning the ground allows each individual farmer to work their land and creams off most of the profits generated from the crops produced.

The landowner has ultimate control. If they decide to kick you off the land, your livelihood is gone. Should they put their charges up, you must somehow work harder or make less income.

It’s rumoured that some Facebook accounts accidentally disappeared as a result of the outage in October 2021 (“kicked off”). And we’re all familiar with the gradual, ever-increasing difficulty of achieving a realistic level of organic reach with Facebook posts for businesses (“make less income”).

The problem with relying on Google or Facebook to generate leads for your business is that you are sharecropping.

But why should your landlord continue to support your business as before (or at all)?

All the signs are that they don’t really know you or care about your business.

How do you escape from the digital sharecropping trap?

If we take the need for your to have a quality product or service as a ‘given’ – because your business is not going to thrive or grow without demand for it in the marketplace – here’s what you need.

In the first place, you build your own website and host it in a way that you control. This becomes your digital headquarters and the place to which you aim to direct all potential leads and customers. Don’t send them to your Facebook page.

Secondly, you want to set up, maintain and grow an email list. It’s a means of communicating with new customers and retaining existing ones. This is the kind of thing you set up through email marketing software provided by companies such as MailChimp, ConvertKit or AWeber. Many options are available, some of them free.

It is possible to make this workable just with a website or just with an email list.

A website is probably the best investment to start with. It allows you to explain your business in a way which is easy to find online and – provided it’s set up well enough – makes it easy to add content regularly (which increases its visibility and findability via the various search engines).

There are local businesses in Moray which can help you create the website ‘home base’ your business needs.

For example –

Canary Dwarf (Forres).

Hedley Enterprises (Portknockie).

Seeing communication through 21st Century eyes, we tend to imagine things have always been this way.

But that’s not right.

In fact, our trajectory is more towards how things were before the advent of mass communication.

In other words, towards the way things have been for the vast majority of human history, with the exception of a few decades.

The move is towards a more local way of seeing and doing things.

Until fairly recently, we lived together in settlements which were pretty much cut off from the next town or village. And even more so from those further afield in the country or across the world.

The people in these places – say, Lossiemouth, Elgin, Aberlour, Forres, Dufftown – transacted business with one another face-to-face, based on their preferences and desires.

The way they thought about things, what they believed and how they behaved was isolated from the folk who lived in other social realities – fundamental differences based on geographic divides.

Invention of the printing press helped information spread between geographic areas. Radio and television enabled mass sharing of culture.

Most of the world’s living population is a product of the radio and television years – and beyond – when it comes to both business and media. It’s hardly surprising, then, that we are so inclined to think in national and international terms.

One school of thought holds that we would be better adjusting our focus to the local ecosystem instead.

This approach – known as “localism” – is gaining traction across the political spectrum.

The localist view emphasises local production and consumption of goods. It focuses on local governmental control. It champions local identity – local history and culture.

It stands in contrast to centralised government, for example.

It depends on seeing the atomic unit of society as the community. Something small enough for their to be trust among members. Something that’s not too large to result in mass anonymity.

There are signs of an unravelling or splintering of society across the UK and the localism argument encourages people to lean into it – to embrace the local above the national.

What are the arguments in favour of localism?

In an article directed at the US experience in this context, Sean Blanda identifies two main causes (though there are many) of the mood to embrace localism:

• the lack of a shared “now”; and
• the lack of a shared “here”.

The ‘now’ element refers to the incessant overwhelm of real-time news from numerous media sources which makes us feel that everything and everyone in the world is awful.

The ‘here’ part refers to how geography used to insulate us from this fate. We didn’t know what was going on in the next country let alone on the other side of the world. Or, at least, certainly we did not apprehend it immediately.

Our trust in others has diminished markedly due the media-highlighted unacceptable – even evil – behaviour of other humans. Yet most of these folk are not in our vicinity. We should not be allowing them to impact our psychological well-being as we do.

We’ve tended to concentrate on the global aspects of digital media, not the local possibilities.

For sure, the world-wide web has allowed us to reach like-minded persons across all continents. It has enabled groupings of people based on values and interests instead of location.

But the fact remains that we can employ digital media skills to enhance – ‘in real life’ – our chosen, local communities.

It’s possible to have a platform that reaches many folk in the local community. That has significant potential for helping local businesses across the board get the word out about their features and benefits.

Ultimately, physical location is ‘where it’s at’. And for us, that’s Moray, partly-historic-Banffshire, Grampian, Scotland, UK, Europe, World.

Some Elgin streets have gained a reputation for particular types of “shopping”.

South Street became known as The Wedding Street.

And North Street was reputed (for a day) to be Divorce Street.

But Batchen Street – which almost connects South Street to North Street – is a Brilliant Street.

It is a focal point for locally-owned businesses in Elgin and has several out-of-the-ordinary outlets. Great co-operation among the businesses enables them to play off each other’s strengths. An ideal place to browse, snack or eat, right in the centre of Elgin.

Here’s a selection of what’s on offer.

Pencil Me In (Stationery Shop)

A wide and unusual selection of greetings cards as well as stationery you can’t live without. The beautifully-presented Pencil Me In website is a good place to visit too if you can’t easily get to the shop in person.

Sirology

A shop for blokes.

Against the Grain

Taproom beer emporium. A selection of craft beers from Moray/Speyside and beyond.

Manna

Juice bar and healthy eatery. Fresh Juice, coffees, hot drinks and soup. Quality bagels, pitta breads and wraps. Super cakes.

J.C. Dawson (Butcher)

Long-established (1889) and award-winning butcher’s shop which is fiercely traditonal in layout and presentation but not afraid of product experimentation and development – with notable success. As well as the basic versions, all ‘unusual’ varieties of sausage and burger are highly recommended.

As Mr Dawson himself says, if you’re polite to people and sell a quality product, you don’t reallt need to advertise to continue a successful business.

Planta

Cafe eatery and wine bar. Aims to be an extension of the traditional coffee shop with an enhanced food offering, focusing on a healthy variety of choices.

Bay Tree Florists and Gifts

Quality flowers, designs and service, from contemporary to wild and natural garden style creations.

Bijou

Spread over 2 floors, this store offers cards, gifts, jewellery and a newly-refurbished coffee shop on the first floor.

Batchen Street Coffee

Speciality Coffee Shop serving breakfast, brunch and lunch alongside cakes, pastries and great drinks.