The Tell

When Craft gives way to Profit

I drove past Denby Pottery this week, knowing it is in the final stages of its death throes. The smart German cars in the car park belong, I suspect, to well-paid professionals there to extract the last ounce of value and strip the last usable meat from the corpse of the business. It makes me angry. Not so much a clash of cultures as cultures that can’t even see each other.

I arrived home to the news that joint administrators had been appointed to Radley and Co, the handbag maker and owner of the famous Scottie Dog tag.. Within days a pre-pack deal transferred the Radley brand and its intellectual property to Gordon Brothers, an American investment firm best known here as the owner of Poundland. The deal did not include the retail operation, so two standalone shops and 19 concessions will close once the remaining stock has been sold. 42 staff will lose their jobs.

Gordon Brothers has said it will run the brand on an asset-light basis, through licensing, wholesale and e-commerce. There will be no Radley shop, and before long no Radley factory in any meaningful sense.

The thought I keep returning to is a distinction between two kinds of maker. Entrepreneurs have a particular skill: the ability to spot opportunities in markets and make a profit by filling them. They are episodic; they go from project to project as they spot gaps, and whilst as individuals they may be remembered as celebrities; the products they create rarely have long lives.

Artisans are different. Whether they are makers or artists, their affinity is with what they produce; its meaning to them matters more than its market value. They may not become celebrities, but sometimes what they make will.

Radley is a very different story to Denby, but the similarities interest me. The company was established in 1998, though Lowell Harder, the Australian designer who founded it, had been trading from a stall in Camden Market since the 1980s; and she had a good eye for opportunity. Radley grew quickly. In 2006 Phoenix Equity Partners bought it for around £42 million. The following year Exponent paid £130 million for it. The making had not tripled in 19 months; the marketing story had. Exponent’s case for the higher price rested on the strength of the brand and its advertising, rather than on anything made. In 2016 Bregal Freshstream acquired Radley from Exponent and held it for a decade. In 2026 it put the business up for sale. Four private equity owners in 20 years.

The stories rhyme. Both collapses were blamed on external conditions rather than on the hollowing out of resilience as profits were taken. At Denby you only had to track research and development against marketing spend. At Radley it showed in the ownership history, and in the quality drift customers reported long before the administrators arrived. Trustpilot and the long-form review sites carried the same complaints: bags coming apart, finishes failing, customer service unresponsive. One phrase recurred. It is not the brand it used to be. The brand remained; the people who owned it did not love it.

Over a coffee, I decided to follow the story of the rhyme. I found five signs running not just through Denby and Radley but through many other businesses with their heritage in craft.

The first is in capital allocation, in the ratio between what makes the thing and what markets it. Spend inverts: research and development against marketing, apprenticeship against campaign spend, capex against opex. When the ratios invert, the business has silently reclassified itself, regardless of what the brand story says.

The second is in the people: the age profile of the skill holders, the provenance of the senior team, the presence or absence of a successor for the founder.

The third is in the language. The labels move from made to designed, from curated to licensed. Words like lifestyle, asset-light and platform ecosystem arrive, and each one tells you how the business has come to see itself.

The fourth is in the model. Licensing proliferates as a growth story rather than a peripheral revenue line. Growth comes from wholesale into third-party environments rather than from developing its own channels. Finishing and decoration are outsourced while the origin claim stays in the language.

The fifth is in the ownership. A private equity holder sells to another private equity holder on short holds; pass the parcel with the brand until the music stops.

Each sign is barely noticeable on its own. Assembled, they become a tell, in the gambling sense, which seems apt given what happens to these businesses. I put the tells to an AI and ran a search; and the results were fairly predictable. Three sectors came up: ceramics, heritage leather and accessories, and heritage cookware and hardware.

The common thread was the ownership history rather than the product category. In almost every case the business had been sold by its founder, or the founder’s family, to private equity or a financial owner between 15 and 25 years ago, and it is now in the late stage of that ownership cycle.

Much the same is true for the individual artisan. Working on your own is tough enough, but at least you have agency. If you are an artisan inside a business founded on craft, that should be an alarm. Artisans have learned their craft well enough to move beyond process, and process is a nuisance to anyone trying to maximise returns. The focus of craft is the product. The focus of private equity is the return. When the narrative turns to numbers, craft comes second.

Peter Korn talks of us having a first, second or third person relationship with the work we do. First person: I made this for you. Second person: I helped you make this for them. Third person: I was part of this getting made. As we move from the first to the third, we move further from the people who use what we have had a hand in, until we become invisible. Brands that matter have first- and second-person relationships.

Making scale, productivity and efficiency the priorities takes us all into the third person. We end up having no connection to the people who buy what we help make, except for the cost of our labour. And when we become a cost, we are an economic hiccup away from being made redundant.

Yet the very thing that makes so many fear redundancy is, as I am discovering, also what creates resilience and independence. What it hinges on is an idea of craft.

Craft is like genius. We all have it in one form or another, however submerged it may have become through our education and training regimes. AI cannot do craft. It lacks the understanding and the mētis required. But it can do remarkable things for those who do.

It is often said that the problem with a race to the bottom is that you might win. That is the race being offered to us by companies and recruiters. Connecting instead to work where the person who buys what you create can see you is a different matter altogether.

Perhaps, at some point, private equity will run out of places where people who cared have quietly built value to extract.

Algorithms are ace at process. Perhaps we should leave them to it, and aim to do what they cannot. Because when it comes to craft and what matters beyond money, AI does not create value