Leading the march for Harris Tweed

EVERY year thousands of Scottish-Americans bring the Manhattan traffic to a standstill when they march up 6th Avenue. Accompanied by pipe bands, drummers, clans and pipers, the Tartan Day marchers evoke the memory of President Woodrow Wilson, the son of a Scots-Irish Presbyterian minister, who said: "Every line in America's history is a line coloured by Scottish blood."

One man who has not missed a parade each April is Alan Bain, president of The American Scottish Foundation, founder of the World-Wide Business Centres network and a major shareholder and director of Harris Tweed Textiles.

Today, dressed in lightweight linen as opposed to Harris Tweed or tartan, he is marching up Princes Street, where we meet for our interview. It's a busy schedule. Later he is due at Queen Margaret University to receive an honorary doctorate. He has to fit in a trip to Stornoway to appoint a new chief executive of his textile firm before returning to Edinburgh to host a leadership conference as part of the Homecoming Scotland celebrations.

For a man who was born in London and has spent most of his working life in the States he appears to have an awful lot to do with Scotland.

"My parents were both from here," he says in his strong transatlantic drawl. "So I have always been part of the diaspora." It is the Scottish diaspora, estimated to be more than 35 million worldwide, with 15 million living in America, that Bain believes is underused in helping bring business to Scotland.

"I don't think Scotland is really at all aware of the huge impact that it has on the US," he says. "The US was born in the height of the Scottish Enlightenment and the influence was huge. If you look at America, its medical practice, educational practice, church, science and banking sectors are all inspired by Scotland. The whole structure of government and the constitution is predicated on the Declaration of Arbroath, signed in 1320 by people who were themselves influenced by Scottish values. My job at the American Scottish Foundation is to get this message across."

In two weeks' time Bain, one of the architects of Tartan Week, will be hosting a Homecoming Scotland Leadership Conference at Queen Margaret University, where he hopes to bring together leaders of Scottish affiliation groups from around the world to promote business links and enhance the relationship that exists between Scotland and its diaspora.

"Americans tend to think of people such as Andrew Carnegie and John Muir as Americans," he says. "They don't think of them as Scots. The idea is to highlight Scotland's role and influence in America."

Harris Tweed is one industry in which Bain has put his money where his mouth is. He was first introduced to the brand in 1993 when, as president of the American Scottish Foundation, he raised money for some new double-width looms on the island and commissioned a report to see how America could help what was then an industry very much in decline.

"My interest was whetted. But it wasn't until 2004 when I met Derek Reid, a former chairman of the Scottish Tourist Board who had just bought the Carloway Mill, that I decided I wanted to be involved.

"We both agreed that it was tragic that we had seen this iconic Scottish global brand, with good brand recognition, disappear off the face of the earth, it just seemed inertia had taken over."

The past two years have been particularly rocky for Harris Tweed. While this luxurious fabric from the Outer Hebrides has proved popular with leading British fashion designers over the past 20 years, including Vivienne Westwood, and is worn by celebrities such as Madonna and Gywneth Paltrow, orders have waned in recent years.

The latest storm engulfing the industry involves Brian Haggas, who in 2007 bought KM Group, the biggest Harris Tweed manufacturer in the Western Isles, and promised to transform the industry's fortunes.

From his base in Yorkshire, Haggas decreed that Harris Tweed's infinite and quixotic range of patterns would be rationalised to four Haggas-approved designs. He cut the workforce from 100 to 15 and then manufactured nearly 1m of Harris Tweed jackets. It was a major departure from simply weaving the cloth.

Bain's vision for the fabric is to increase its appeal by bringing well-known designers on board. He has completed deals with Adidas and Fred Perry. American label Calvin Klein featured a number of crisp Harris Tweed overcoats in its 2009 winter men's collection. Italian powerhouse Gucci has recently placed an order for the fabric. Earlier this year he brokered a deal with Alfa Romeo, who on request will upholster the interior of their MiTo sports car with Harris Tweed. Later this month, upmarket cloth merchants Holland and Sherry will be importing it into the States.

"The major problem we now face is meeting demand. When I came into the industry we were producing around 1.6 million metres of Harris Tweed a year. In 2008 that went down to around 300,000 metres and this year it will probably fall to around 250,000 metres. The effect on the industry has been devastating. It has been very challenging.

"Harris Tweed has been so badly neglected for so long that the industry is facing some serious issues. The biggest problem is the lack of young people coming into the industry and the older weavers retiring. We need to capture their knowledge before it disappears.

"If we are all successful, and I anticipate we will be, the real issue will be do we have enough weavers?"

Bain moved to the US in the early Sixties after reading law at Cambridge University. His idea then was to create a transatlantic legal practice, but after graduating from Columbia University he practised as a corporate finance lawyer in New York.

Working on a number of Wall Street acquisitions he realised the major problem was that the transactions were often held up by the slow process of having to travel back to New York to conduct business. In an age before e-mail and the internet he came up with the idea of creating an international chain of business service centres providing office space, conference facilities, telephone, fax and secretarial services.

"We launched at exactly the same time as British Overseas Airways Corporation (now British Airways] was launching a new business travel department. I knew some of the senior management from my time in Cambridge, they liked my idea and so we cross-promoted. From New York we grew into London, Paris, Brussels and Zurich."

That was the early Seventies. Today the firm, World-Wide Business Centres, has a licence agreement with 150 locations, turning over more than $250 million (150m). It was through this link that, in the mid-Nineties, Bain was first introduced to the American Scottish Foundation. The move coincided with devolution and Scotland's desire to play its own role on the international stage.

"I remember the first time we got together for the Tartan Day parade," he says. "At that stage we didn't have a permit so we had to fight the traffic and walk on the sidewalk.

"Our route was from the British Embassy in New York to the United Nations building on the east side of the city and we were accompanied by just two pipers. Since then it has grown like Topsy."