Inside the Walsall Workshop Where Robots Are Not Welcome: Ettinger's Handcrafted Legacy

Deep inside one of Walsall's last remaining leather goods factories, Gary Billingham picks up a single wallet panel and explains what most shoppers never see. Twenty-eight separate pieces of leather must be cut, thinned, turned, glued and stitched by hand before an Ettinger wallet leaves the building.

Billingham's guiding principle is straightforward. "It is all down to attention to detail," he says, "and everything we do is based around that." At Ettinger, that is not a marketing line — it is a production philosophy that shapes every stage of the manufacturing process.

The cutting begins with a hydraulic press, which stamps out the component pieces with precision. But automation stops there. Each cut edge is then skived — thinned down at the margins — so that when the leather is folded, the finished seam lies perfectly flat rather than bulging at the join. It is exacting, unhurried work that a machine cannot easily replicate.

Walsall's identity has long been bound up in leather. The West Midlands town built much of its industrial character around the trade, supplying saddlery, harnesses and small leather goods to markets across Britain and the empire. The factories that remain today are a fraction of what once existed, squeezed by cheap overseas competition and shifting consumer habits across the latter half of the twentieth century.

Ettinger has survived where others have not, positioning itself firmly in the luxury tier where heritage and handwork command a price premium. The brand produces wallets, card holders, belts and cigar cases, among other accessories, all assembled by a small, skilled workforce on the factory floor.

The case for keeping production in Britain — and in Walsall specifically — is partly commercial and partly philosophical. Luxury consumers increasingly want to know where a product was made and by whom. A credible manufacturing story, rooted in a real place with a real craft tradition, is harder to imitate than a logo.

The 28-piece wallet construction that Billingham demonstrates is a case in point. Each component must meet exacting tolerances before it is passed to the next stage. A miscut panel or an uneven skive will show in the finished article; there is no software patch for a poorly turned edge.

The workforce required to maintain those standards takes years to develop. Skills that look simple — consistent hand-stitching, reading the grain of a hide, knowing how much pressure a particular leather needs at the press — accumulate slowly and are not easily transferred from a manual. Ettinger's ability to retain that knowledge in-house is itself a competitive asset.

The factory's position within Walsall also carries a broader significance. High-end British manufacturing has drawn renewed attention as policymakers and business leaders debate the value of keeping specialised industrial capacity onshore. The argument is no longer purely nostalgic; it touches on supply-chain resilience, skills retention and the export potential of brands that can credibly claim "made in Britain."

Ettinger is the third subject in a Guardian series profiling high-end British manufacturers. Earlier instalments visited Hiut Denim in Wales, where jeans production has returned to a former mill town, and Rolls-Royce's bespoke division, where customers commission hand-finished interiors drawn from materials as varied as feathers and family pet portraits.

What links all three is a refusal to fully automate — a judgment that the premium their customers pay depends on the irreducible presence of human hands at the heart of the process. At Ettinger, that judgment is stitched into every seam.