Scotland - true home of tartan
Other modern examples abound - college students in Russia's St. Petersburg used the Scottish Tartans Authority (STA) online design programme to mount a a competition for the St.Petersburg tartan.
More recently, the STA donated a new tartan design and 30 metres of fabric to the tiny New Zealand town of Hororata to help it raise runds to repair its earthquake damaged church.
A decade ago when the obscenity of 9/11 shocked the world, New York’s Mayor Rudy Giuliani asked Lochcarron of Scotland to relaunch one of its tartans and name it for New York City - this the company did and added two black lines to commemorate forever the Twin Towers disaster.
Tartan in all its forms contributes around £350 million to the Scottish economy. But as globalisation takes its toll, Scotland suffers from its own success and its new markets have awakened to the economic potential of tartan and are exporting their cheaper versions of the Scottish brand, not just to Scotland itself, but to Scotland’s traditional markets around the globe.
What appears as a threat however, highlights the great opportunities for Scotland’s shrinking tartan industry as it and only it can deliver the authentic Scottish product. It has what no other tartans in the world can claim - provenance - and there is a growing and influential niche market willing to pay a premium for that guarantee of authenticity.
One of tartan’s unassailable attributes is one that can never be diluted by however many faux tartans come onto the market and that is, to the rest of the world TARTAN = SCOTLAND. It’s that quiet and understated marketing message, that branding, that is tartan’s greatest gift to the wider Scottish economy. It’s a gift that spills over onto tourism, whisky, food and drink, electronics, industrial fabrics, financial services, the alternative energy sector and indeed every product and service emanating from Scotland - the true home of tartan.
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