This story originally appeared on the Gents Cafe Newsletter. You can subscribe here.
The weight of history is not measured by the dust of time, but by the tangible objects it leaves behind: a box of press clippings, a medal, and many other indelible marks of a memorable life.
For James Eden, Founder and CEO of Private White V.C., this history was the spark that ignited the brand. Built upon the legacy of his great-grandfather, Private Jack White V.C., the label stands as a resolute testament to British manufacturing, valuing genuine provenance and recognisable, perennial designs. His journey is one of honoring a century-old commitment to craft in the face of modern industry challenges.
In this Brand Talks interview, James recounts how he left a finance career in London during the credit crunch to save a historic Manchester factory, and shares why he made a commitment to source over 90% of materials within a twenty-mile radius from that very factory.
The story of Private White V.C. traces back to 1917 with your great-grandfather, Private Jack White, being rewarded with the Victoria Cross as a war hero. Can you recall a specific moment that made you discover this history and the weight of its legacy?
There wasn’t exactly a single specific moment. Instead, my first real insights and reverence for my great-grandfather came directly from my grandmother, the daughter of Private Jack White V.C. (where V.C. stands for “Victoria Cross”). Her father unfortunately passed away prematurely at the age of 50, but like any proud daughter, she was always eager to recall his heroics both in battle and in industry. Whenever anyone asked, she would go straight to the attic and bring out her treasures. She had boxes upon boxes of press clippings, ornate stationery, and beautiful letters. Back then, long before the era of digital invites, formal events were announced with nicely crafted paper. She kept garden passes for Buckingham Palace and invitations to remembrance events at the Cenotaph in London, maintaining a pristine copy of absolutely everything.
Among her collection were old boys’ comics, including a famous UK publication called the Victor comic, which actually illustrated my great-grandfather’s story. We still have the artwork from those old comics blown up on the walls of our factory store today. As a young kid who loved comics, being educated about a great-grandfather who was a war hero and who had met the King and Queen was simply intoxicating. It planted a seed very early on that I was connected to someone incredibly special and deeply respected.
During my childhood, the most magical part of his story was undoubtedly the Victoria Cross and his exploits on the battlefield. But as I matured, I began to realize that his military service was really just the beginning of his journey. Later in life, he became equally revered for what he achieved as a local business owner, a facet of his life that fascinated me deeply as I reached a certain age. Today, we are incredibly fortunate to still have that entire archive intact. We hold all the original press clippings, packaging, and invitations from his postwar life as a celebrated veteran, alongside his dress medals from King George V and the actual Victoria Cross itself, ensuring that both his military and industrial legacies are never forgotten.
After the war, your great-grandfather Jack returned to Manchester. He began an apprenticeship as a pattern cutter in his local raincoat factory, rising to general manager and later sole owner. The business then moved on into other ownerships but in 2010 you bought the factory and started the brand Private White V.C. What motivated that decision?
If I am entirely honest, it was a mix of delusion and madness. To give you some context, I come from a very traditional professional background. My father is a retired solicitor, his brother was a doctor, and their father was a doctor before them. Unlike Italy, which still retains a significant and vibrant textile infrastructure, the industry in the UK has strongly declined. Going into textiles was never suggested to my generation; it simply wasn’t an option. Frankly, there was more of a chance of me playing for Manchester United than going to work in a clothing factory.
Because of that environment, I went down a rather expected route. I went to university at Cambridge, moved to London, and started a graduate scheme working in finance for a European investment bank. Then, the credit crunch hit. I was working right in the heart of the City of London at Liverpool Street, effectively in the eye of the storm, and the financial world appeared to be imploding all around me. Coincidentally, around that exact same time, the factory in Manchester lost its principal customer and was left in a highly vulnerable position.
I had always maintained a deep emotional attachment to the factory we are sitting in today. Recognizing the existential threat it was facing, and realizing that I had no major overheads tying me to London, I found myself filled with energy, enthusiasm, and perhaps a bit of misplaced arrogance. I handed over my badge, resigned from my position at the investment bank, and set out to revitalize the factory.
I knew the facility possessed the skills to make remarkably beautiful, high-quality garments, but they had always been producing for other labels. Running a capital and labor intensive manufacturing business at the whim of third-party brands is incredibly difficult and dangerous. I realized very quickly that to secure the future of the factory and its community, we had to shift our foundation from private label to Private White, if you allow me the pun. It was a massive undertaking to transition from manufacturing for others to building our own standalone identity, but many years later, I can say we were successful in securing the legacy of the building and the brilliant craftspeople within it.
When you took over, the factory was primarily a white-label manufacturer for some of the world’s most famous luxury houses. What were the biggest challenges in shifting the factory’s DNA from a manufacturer to an independent brand?
Shifting the factory’s DNA took a very long time. The good news was that we didn’t have a product problem; this factory has always produced incredible garments. However, having a great product is only part of the equation. To survive as an independent label, you also need a loyal client base, market familiarity, a poetic story, and an efficient marketing structure—none of which we had at the beginning. We had to slowly and steadily win hearts and minds by relying on the quality of our product, combined with the provenance of the people and the processes we adhere to.
When the time came to name the brand, the idea to use Private White V.C. was there almost immediately. It certainly wasn’t going to be my name. As one of five children, I am actually quite an introvert; I don’t want to be the center of attention. When a founding team member suggested using my name for a split second, I immediately vetoed it. I wanted a namesake that was far more honest, honorable, and authentic. My great-grandfather pioneered and built this factory. We work principally from the archives he founded, and the core values he instilled—a deep commitment to local craft, local materials, and local employees—are what still thrive here today. It was the most logical and respectful choice we could make.
Furthermore, his military background accurately reflected our manufacturing archives, which are filled with historical military references. The most celebrated and recognized silhouettes in global menswear—the peacoat, the flight jacket, the bomber, the trench coat, the greatcoat—are all rooted in military design. The story and the product were perfectly consistent. I was never in any doubt about what the backbones of the collection would be, and those silhouettes remain our most popular pieces today. We still produce the classic Harrington and the Jack’s Mac using those same foundational fabrics, though we’ve naturally updated the proportions to evolve with the times. Historically, Manchester was known as “Cottonopolis,” and I’m not sure what could be more quintessentially British, or more true to Manchester, than a locally made, fly-fronted cotton raincoat. That waterproof coat was the anchor of our very first collection, it still is today, and I like to think it will remain there for generations to come.
My great-grandfather pioneered and built this factory. We work principally from the archives he founded, and the core values he instilled are what still thrive here today.
Your great-grandfather used copper telephone wire during his heroic rescue in WWI. To honor that, copper runs through every garment that you create. Tell us more about these unique details.
When you are developing a product, you have to deeply consider who you are designing for. If I look at myself as the ideal archetype for our customer, I have a certain degree of confidence in my outlook and my personal style. I certainly don’t need a massive logo blasted across my chest. However, I do recognize and appreciate the value of a subtle signature device. Whether it is the red tab on a pair of Levi’s or a discreet Prada detail, those elements matter. I wanted our garments to have a defining mark, but it had to be incredibly stealthy, understated, and elegant. Most importantly, it had to carry genuine romance and meaning.
The use of copper became the perfect way to weave our brand narrative directly into the clothing. It is highly functional, too. All of our zips are copper. As men, we love pockets, and we are constantly worried about losing our everyday items. If I have a secure internal pocket with a sturdy zip, or a patch pocket secured by a stud, I am absolutely delighted. We want to construct garments that safely store your life.
Beyond the hardware, copper serves as a beautiful accent throughout the collections. We use copper rivets to reinforce the hang loops on the back of the neck, and if you pop the collar on one of our raincoats, you will find the nod to my great-grandfather’s backstory. We also incorporate copper tones into our internal sealing tape, binding, and piping.
You’ve likened your design process to a top chef stripping back a dish to its essential ingredients. Can you elaborate on this curious analogy?
I often say we are not entirely in the “fashion business.” Of course, we are selling style and ensuring men feel confident and special, but our core approach is vastly different from traditional fashion. In this industry, you need a certain amount of “icing” to communicate and sell the cake. But the true foundation of our business consists of our icons, the best selling shapes and silhouettes that anchor our brand year after year. We are not designing massive, all-encompassing thematic collections. Our customer doesn’t actually want more choice; he wants the supreme confidence that he is buying the absolute right thing. He is typically a well-read, well-traveled purist. He wants to buy his wine from a specific vineyard, his shoes from Northampton or Alden in New England, his tailoring from Savile Row, and his outerwear from a traditional British maker. If he is looking for a peacoat, he wants to know where he can find the highest quality, most authentic iteration.
As for my habit of using analogies, I suspect it comes from negotiating daily with my three young children—I use a bit of creative license to help make my point! But the chef comparison is entirely accurate. If you speak to any great cook, they will tell you that the ingredients are absolutely everything. There is a massive parallel with our respect for produce, provenance, and supply chains.
From a distance, it takes a discerning eye to tell the difference between a poly-wool blend and pure Merino, much like distinguishing a standard flat iron cut from a premium Kobe steak from across the room. But the proof is always in the eating, or in our case, the wearing. If you eat a poorly prepared piece of meat, you notice it immediately. Similarly, if you step out into the freezing rain in a reconstituted poly-cotton coat that doesn’t perform, it becomes painfully evident that you lack a quality product. Because we place such immense importance on our cloth and components, we don’t need to be overly adventurous. If our factory were a kitchen, there would be no elaborate foams, theatrical jus, or unnecessary garnishes. We simply take a beautiful piece of raw material, treat it with immense reverence, apply just a little bit of seasoning, and let the ingredients do the talking. You hear top chefs emphasize the supremacy of ingredients all the time, yet bizarrely, it is a philosophy rarely followed in the clothing industry.
We simply take a beautiful piece of raw material, treat it with immense reverence, apply just a little bit of “seasoning,” and let the ingredients do the talking.
You source over 90% of your materials within just 20 miles of the factory. What is the greatest challenge in maintaining such a tight local supply chain, and how does this proximity reward the final character of your garments?
The reason we source so locally is simply because we refuse to compromise on quality, fabrication, or construction. Most brands don’t talk openly about the quality of their cloth because they are designing to a specific price point. They look for a Prince of Wales check and dictate that it must cost exactly six pounds a meter. We do not operate that way. We decide that we want to create the absolute best version of a garment, and then we ask ourselves who in our immediate vicinity specializes in making the necessary raw materials. From there, we turn to the exact same mills, weavers, and families that this factory has been working with for 70 to 100 years. There aren’t exactly many tech startups entering the traditional textile weaving space, so those generational, localized relationships are everything to the character of our clothes.
Is it of course very challenging to maintain such a tight local supply chain nowadays. But if it were easy, everyone would be doing it. Unfortunately, it is becoming harder than ever to manufacture this way in the UK. There are days when the logistical hurdles feel insurmountable, but thankfully, our growing international popularity usually overcompensates for the struggles we face on the production side.
As the world becomes more automated, however, I find myself feeling quite ambitious and excited about the path we’ve chosen. Recently, I attended a wedding with friends from twenty years ago—successful solicitors, accountants, doctors, and dentists. When I initially left the finance world to work in textiles, they all thought I was completely mad. Now, I joke with them that in a few years, when artificial intelligence takes over their white-collar livelihoods, they will be banging on my factory door begging me to teach them how to sew. Jokes aside, there is real substance to that shift. In this era of hyper-digitization, traditional, tactile craftsmanship is becoming increasingly rare, highly sought after, and recognized for its true intrinsic value by passionate, niche communities all over the world.
You chose radical transparency with your ‘Pricing Manifesto.’ Why was it important for you to be this honest with your community, and what does it say about your definition of ‘true luxury’?
I launched the Pricing Manifesto quite a while ago, and I don’t have any regrets about doing it at the time. It was a way to cut through all the noise. Since then, we’ve seen other brands do something similar, albeit with very different business models. For me, it was a way to embrace transparency in an industry that is too often smothered by ambiguity, smoke and mirrors, and greenwashing. There is unfortunately a lot of nonsense and bad practice that goes on in the clothing business globally. I wanted to radically distinguish ourselves by communicating exactly what we stand for, where we make our garments, and how we treat our people. We wanted to get on the radar of men and women who might not ordinarily encounter our values.
While we don’t necessarily publish the exact costs and markups for every single product anymore, that core ethos of transparency remains absolutely central to what we do. We operate out of a 30,000-square-foot factory that dates back to 1853. We have visitors walking the factory floor every single day, and they are consistently blown away. First, they are surprised by the scale of what we do; while it is tiny compared to the football-stadium-sized operations you might find in the Far East, it is a much bigger operation than most people expect. It looks like a 150-year-old building, it smells like one, and depending on the season, you can certainly feel the winter chill or the summer heat inside it.
We try to be as transparent as possible in all our communications, and I think our community truly appreciates that. They love the idea of being able to invest directly in an actual maker. This is my definition of true luxury: supporting genuine craft rather than handing your money over to a big, faceless luxury brand that funnels its resources away from the product and into wrapping double-decker buses or paying Hollywood A-listers to front their marketing campaigns.
If you had to tell the story of Private White V.C. through three of your most iconic garments, which ones would you choose — and what part of the journey does each represent?
The first would undoubtedly be Jack’s Mac. Named after my great-grandfather, it is one of the most iconic British silhouettes—the classic cotton waterproof raincoat. What makes it truly special is that it is crafted from Ventile, a remarkable material developed during the Second World War at the request of Winston Churchill. He commissioned the Ministry of Defence to devise a fabric that would prolong the survival rates of Royal Air Force pilots who had to ditch in the freezing ocean. That life-saving material was pioneered right here in Manchester at the Shirley Institute, just a few miles north of where our factory sits today. So, you have a Manchester-made, waterproof cotton raincoat, constructed in the last remaining clothing factory in the world’s oldest industrial city. It perfectly encapsulates everything we are about.
The second garment would be our Rider Trench Coat. For the last 150 years, this factory has manufactured for the armed forces, and in the 1940s, we produced heavy cotton trench coats specifically for the dispatch riders of the Allied Armed Forces. Today, we still utilize that silhouette. We craft it in Ventile, but we have elevated it with a detachable cashmere liner. That liner is a direct, double-sided homage to my great-grandfather’s military-issued blanket from 1916, tying his personal legacy directly to a functional piece of modern outerwear.
Finally, I would have to choose our bestselling piece: the woolen Peacoat. The Melton wool we use comes from a place called Delph, over in Oldham, just a stone’s throw from here. We have been working with that exact same mill, using that exact same Melton, for over a century. The iconic double-breasted silhouette of the peacoat has effortlessly stood the test of time. It is a highly recognizable garment that completely typifies our mission: creating military-inspired, exceptionally high-quality clothing constructed using only the finest regionally sourced materials.
Beyond the heritage and the business growth, what has been the most unexpected or rewarding part of running the factory for you personally?
I have to admit, I didn’t realize just how difficult this journey was going to be. It is an incredibly demanding business with lots of moving parts and intense competition from overseas. Over the years, a cultural mindset has developed where many people have almost forgotten what true quality means, fixating solely on price. Fortunately, our core demographic is highly discerning. While everyone pays an appropriate amount of consideration to the cost, what our customer is really after is value. If the price-to-quality ratio is correct, they see the value in what we do.
However, getting on the radar of the men who naturally resonate with our craft has been a formidable challenge. As you likely know from your own life, there are just some people you will never be able to convert. I’ve tried to get my wife to enjoy spicy food, and I’ve finally given up—when Sunday curry night rolls around, it’s just my son and me. You see a similar phenomenon in menswear: bizarrely, some men will spend an absolute fortune on a luxury watch or insist on driving a beautiful sports car, yet they put zero thought into how they dress. Converting those men has proven to be more problematic than I initially thought, to the point where we have largely stopped trying to engage a mindset that simply doesn’t care. You cannot force it.
Through all of those commercial challenges, the single most rewarding part of this journey has been witnessing the pride and passion on the factory floor every single day. To produce the level of garments we make requires an incredible application of skill, unwavering standards, and an obsessive attention to detail. Seeing that level of daily dedication from our team is deeply inspiring, and it continually pushes me to ensure we are doing our absolute best, day in and day out.
The single most rewarding part of this journey has been witnessing the pride and passion on the factory floor every single day.
When you step away from the factory floor, where do you find your inspiration, and what does a life lived with ‘intention’ look like for James Eden?”
At the moment, I am firmly knee-deep in parenthood. Living with intention, for me, means making a concerted effort to spend as much time as possible with the people I hold dear. Like so many of us, I am aware of how much time I spend staring at that “monster” in my hand—I think we are all probably a bit addicted to our smartphones. Because I work such long hours at the factory during the week, I try to combat that digital pull by making my weekends virtually off-limits to anyone outside my immediate inner circle of friends and family. I draw a massive amount of inspiration from my three young children. They are reaching an age where they are becoming incredibly inquisitive, bringing up serious subject matters, and it is fascinating to help them navigate those choppy waters. Of course, I also draw daily inspiration from the incredible team here at the factory.
While I often joke about the phone being a curse, the truth is that if you have a creative mind, there is an undeniably vast network of inspiring writers, photographers, and designers out there to discover. Beyond that, I find immense joy in the world of food. I am certainly not a chef, but I am a very passionate cook. My wife and I get tremendous pleasure from dining out, not simply for the sake of indulgence, but because we genuinely appreciate seeing great produce being handled brilliantly by experts. I enjoy excellent food, and I love good wine. I suppose I am quite a cliché in that regard: I just really appreciate beautifully made things.
