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From time
to time
I can be seen wearing a kilt,
and that despite I’m not Scottish. Nor do I have any Scottish roots.
It more or less started back in the mid nineties during a vacation in Scotland.
One day I
dropped in on a kilt maker’s store in Edinburgh.
The purpose was to get some basic information
on highland wear for a business case study I had in mind and to be used in
connection with my teaching in marketing research and strategy.
The year before, I had got the inspiration to the case from “The Scotch House” in London near Harrods’.
The store was selling
branded goods like Pringle, Burberry etc. but on the ground floor they also
had, slightly elevated from the ground, a veritable and very distinguished
highland department as a shop-in-shop.
To me the highland department was “selling things you don’t need” – a
slogan which years later a major Danish department store unsuccessfully
tried to establish.
Out of
my visit did come the needed information
on what I considered the “impossible” part of the case.
But it also
ended up with me being measured for and persuaded to try on a kilt.
I didn’t buy the kilt.
It was quite expensive and what should I use it for?
Nevertheless
I got a feeling that a
kilt was extremely comfortable to wear, that there was nothing
feminine about it and that it was certainly different to men’s
ordinary garments. In some way I got hooked, so to say.
When I left I had with me a business card from the store with my
measures written on it, just in case. |
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Campbell Ancient and the red Royal Stewart tartan |
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The business case
was about a thought-of Scottish
company selling high quality Scottish products for men and
women through its own stores. The range comprised sweaters,
shirts, jackets, trousers, skirts, bags, ties, belts and on
top of that highland wear (kilts and accessories). Apart
from Edinburgh, Glasgow and Inverness it also had branches
in London and Chicago. Now the company considered whether to
establish stores with probably the same concept on the
European continent and by using a European capital as a test
market. |
A few years
later, having got
access to the rather new Internet, I was considering a revision of the
business case study by including e-trade. |
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Campbell Ancient tartan and a black Utilikilt |
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During my surfing I happened to come to a site where a kilt
was no more than £39.
In order to have an indication of shipment cost I had to fill out
the order and payment forms and thus I reached to the point where clicking “Enter” would mean that I
had bought myself a kilt.
Shall, shall not? It wouldn’t ruin the
family economy in any way, but…
To put it short I clicked “Enter”. A few weeks later I was the
owner of a casual kilt plus some accessories.
The quality was not quite up to the standards of the kilt I had tried on in Edinburgh, but being a non-Scot with absolutely no possibilities to wear a kilt at dress up situations it made the point.
Later I have supplied with some better and more expensive kilts, but without that first cheap kilt I should probably never have started kilt wearing.
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