UK department stores, brands and designers produce essential scrubs and gowns for NHS

In the face of a pandemic crisis, many fashion retailers, designers and luxury brands have stepped up to the occasion and demonstrate their leadership that is so required at these challenging times.

While management executives are prioritizing the safety of employees and customers and putting new health and safety protocols and crisis-response activities in place, many are taking the opportunity to show they care and offer services that do good to the community, which can only score positive points in the eyes of their customers when things do finally go back to normal.

John Lewis image.

For one, department store John Lewis has re-opened its textile factory, ‘Herbert Parkinson’ in Lancashire to make protective gowns for the National Health Service (NHS).  This follows its recent initiative to create a wellbeing area for staff at the newly set-up NHS Nightingale hospitals in London and Manchester and working with the British Medical Association to deliver 60,000 essentials to key NHS staff.

The Herbert Parkinson factory which normally produces bespoke blinds, curtains, cushions, pillows and duvets, will this week begin making around 8,000 washable, clinical gowns for the Northumbria NHS Foundation Trust.  In addition, John Lewis will also be donating more than 20,000 metres of cotton fabric from its haberdashery department and distribution centres to two groups making scrubs for the NHS - ‘For The Love of Scrubs’ and ‘Scrubs Glorious Scrubs’. It is expected that this donated fabric will produce some 6,000 scrubs.

Elsewhere in the UK, fashion luxury brand Mulberry has switched its handbag factory in Somerset to making 8,000 gowns for NHS workers in Bristol.  
Homewares chain Dunelm has also turned its curtain factory into making scrubs for NHS workers, while home and fashion brand Laura Ashley’s factory in Carno, Powyrs, in Wales have also been making scrubs.
A few weeks ago, luxury brand Burberry announced it was underetaking a series of measures, including using its global supply network to deliver 100,000 surgical masks to NHS workers, and dedicating its trench coat factory in Yorkshire to manufacturing non-surgical gowns and masks for patients in British hospitals.
Separately Fashion Roundtable, the secretariat for the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for Textiles and Fashion, announced that it had brought together designers, manufacturers, the UK Cabinet, the Department for International Trade and several brands with the aim of supplying PPE to the NHS and additional protective products to the general public.
Make It British is also uniting UK manufacturers to produce PPE for frontline staff, while British designer Phoebe English is leading a team of independent UK designers – including Bethany Williams and Holly Fulton – to produce non-frontline protective clothing with the Home Office’s Emergency Designer Network.