Stephen Holland and Frederick Sherry started trading wool and silk cloth from 10 Old Bond Street in London in 1836. The firm moved to Golden Square in 1886, then the centre of the London wool merchanting trade, and was exporting internationally by the turn of the century. Holland & Sherry has been trading cloth for close to 190 years now, longer than almost any name a buyer will meet in this business, and it has moved house more than once without losing the trade that follows it.
A merchant, built by moving to where the mills were
Holland & Sherry has never spun or woven its own cloth the way a mill does. It is a merchant house: it commissions weaving from Yorkshire worsted mills and Scottish woollen mills, finishes the cloth to its own standard, and books it into bunches for tailors around the world. In 1968 the firm bought the Scottish cloth merchant Lowe Donald, based in Peebles in the Scottish Borders, and moved its UK distribution into a purpose-built warehouse there. In 1982 the head office moved to Savile Row, where it is still registered today.
Some of what Holland & Sherry sells is woven at Pennine Weavers in Keighley, Yorkshire, the same commission mill that weaves for Dugdale Bros and for the majority of Dormeuil's range. I would not tell a client that a Holland & Sherry length came off some hidden proprietary loom. What is genuinely theirs is the finishing standard they hold every length to before it is allowed into a bunch book, not the building the yarn was woven in.
What the bunches are actually built for
Cape Horn is one of the house's best known suiting bunches: an 18.5 micron wool with a small addition, 1 percent, of cashmere. That is fine enough to look and feel expensive without being so delicate that a shop has to warn a client away from wearing it to work five days a week. It is a staple recommendation, not a special-occasion cloth, and I sell it as one.
Crispaire sits at the other end of the same idea: a 100 percent worsted wool at 280 to 310 grams, 9 to 10 ounces, with a firm, crisp handle built to survive a suitcase and a long-haul flight. It is not the softest cloth in the library, and it is not trying to be. A client who wants drape above everything should not be sold Crispaire. A client who lives in airports should be sold little else.
What to specify it with
Cape Horn and the core worsted weights take canvas construction well, and I put them in half canvas jackets more often than full, since the finishing already gives the cloth enough body that a floating full canvas does not add much a client will feel. Crispaire is the one I reach for when a shop asks for a trouser cloth that will not bag at the knee after a week of flights. Save the finer cashmere blends for a jacket that will not see that kind of daily wear, and check what actually arrived against the bunch reference before you reorder, not just against how the fitting looked.
When the name is not worth putting on your shelf
The rarer end of the Holland & Sherry range, the finer cashmeres and the lower-run specialty bunches, is expensive enough that holding it as open stock is a real bet, not a display decision. I do not recommend a boutique carries those weights on spec unless a client has already asked for them by name. A length sitting on a shelf for months earns you nothing while it waits, no matter how well the name photographs in a lookbook.
We apply the same rule to ourselves. We hold no Holland & Sherry cloth in Shanghai. When a shop confirms an order and names a bunch and reference, we source it, cut it to measure under your own label, and add the mill's release time to our usual 14 to 20 working days.
What we are, and are not, to Holland & Sherry
We buy this cloth as a customer, the way any workshop with a trade account does. We are not an authorised dealer, a licensee, or a representative of Holland & Sherry, and I would not trust a supplier who tells you otherwise without proof. The wool is British by way of Yorkshire and the Scottish Borders. The jacket is cut and sewn in our workshop in Shanghai. Both facts belong on the record, not just the one that sounds better.
Scabal is the other major European merchant name on our list, though unlike Holland & Sherry, it also owns the Huddersfield mill behind a share of its own cloth.
Related: suppliers we hold and order · talk to us about a special order