NEWS: Tartan Trademark

Mark McLaughlin
Edinburgh Evening News
June 16, 2009

THE director of the world's biggest clan gathering has called for an "tartan trademark" to prevent cut-price kilts being passed off as authentically Scottish.

Lord Jamie Sempill, director of The Gathering 2009 and vice-convener of the Standing Council of Scottish Chiefs, said peddling budget kilts and knitwear was a "disservice" to international visitors.

Edinburgh-based Lord Sempill, a former hereditary peer who inherited the chiefdom of the 500-year-old Sempill clan in 1995, said: "The point is to make it very clear that when you pick up a tartan scarf or other tartan product, that there is a legal requirement for it to state its country of origin.

"Tartan is produced and woven around the world to a very high quality, but there is a difference between something that is produced in Scotland as opposed to something produced in Lahore.

"I have no problem with the quality of some of these items necessarily, but I think we're doing a great disservice to international visitors who want to take home something genuinely Scottish but end up going away with something produced in China or India."

Mr Sempill, an ex-Tory candidate, added that any trademark would not preclude budget kiltmakers such as The Gold Brothers, whose budget clothing stores dominate the Royal Mile, continuing to sell cheap internationally produced products as long as they made it clear they were made abroad.

However, Gold Brothers partner Galab Singh said all of their products already had the country of origin clearly marked on the label.

Mr Singh also claimed to have been approached to sell Gold Brothers clothing at The Gathering, something denied by Lord Sempill.

He said: "We told them we weren't interested. We've got too many commitments on the Royal Mile. We were approached by one of their agents who asked us if we'd be interested in setting up a stall but we declined."

Brian Wilton, director of the Scottish Tartans Authority, has already called on the European Parliament to extend its geographical protection scheme to include products other than food and drink, giving heavyweight legal protection to descriptions such as "Scottish tartan", "Scottish kilt" or "Highland kilt".

He said: "If we can get Lord Sempill on board then perhaps we can get the powers-that-be to sit up and take more notice before the last vestiges of Scotland's Highland dress heritage slip down the pan.

"The Scottish Tartans Authority has been grappling with this problem for quite some time and regrettably it isn't as simple as might be imagined.

"Almost every scheme we've looked at is open to abuse if companies are determined to mislabel imported products and hoodwink visiting shoppers."