Interview with James Sleater, CEO, Buffalo Systems

Hi James, can you introduce yourself and your route into fashion

I’m James Sleater, Managing Director of Cad & The Dandy and Norton and Sons both Savile Row tailoring houses, but I’m also an owner of Buffalo Systems, a British technical outdoor clothing brand that’s been going since 1979. My route into fashion wasn’t the conventional fashion-school path, I came at it through the craft and the commercial reality of it. Tailoring teaches you that a garment is an object built to a standard, not a trend to be chased. That principle has shaped everything I’ve done since, including taking on a heritage technical brand that’s the polar opposite of a suit but shares exactly the same values: build it properly, make it last, stand behind it.

While not a standard you hold yourself to, what's your view on whether fashion has become too obsessed with “new” and forgotten how to make things that last?

The relentless drive for newness is what crowds out durability, because you can’t sell someone three jackets a year if the first one lasts a decade. The industry has trained itself, and its customers, to equate freshness with value. The irony is that the things people actually treasure are the coat their father wore, the boots they’ve resoled five times are precisely those things that weren’t designed to be replaced.

So what still needs to change for brands to take repair and longevity seriously?

It has to hit the balance sheet, not just the brand deck. Right now longevity is treated as a marketing story rather than a commercial model, because the incentives all point the other way, repair cannibalises replacement sales. Until brands build the economics so that servicing, repairing, and extending a product’s life is genuinely profitable, it’ll stay a press release. That means designing for repair from the outset.

What do you think is the biggest myth fashion tells itself about sustainability right now?

That you can buy your way to it through materials. Swapping in recycled polyester or organic cotton lets a brand feel virtuous while still producing far too much, far too fast. The single most sustainable thing any brand can do is to make it better.

What does “good product” actually mean to you in 2026?

Something that does its job exceptionally well and keeps doing it for years. For a suit that means cut, cloth, and construction that age beautifully. for a Buffalo jacket it means it performs on a mountain and can be repaired rather than binned. Good product is honest about what it is. We don’t need features that exist only for the spec sheet. If a customer can hand it down or sell it on a decade later, you got it right.

Do you think honest storytelling become a genuine differentiator in a market flooded with sustainability claims?

It’s becoming the only differentiator. When everyone is making the same green noises, specificity is what cuts through real numbers, named or directly owned factories, things you can actually verify. Customers have developed a finely tuned radar for spin, so the brand that says “here’s exactly how this is made, flaws and all” earns more trust than the one with the glossiest manifesto.

Buffalo Systems is keen to maintain its roots and continue to be manufactured in the UK Why does British manufacturing matter right now, and what are people misunderstanding about producing locally?

It matters because it keeps skills, jobs, and accountability close to home, and because shorter supply chains are more resilient and more transparent. What people misunderstand is the economics, local production isn’t a romantic premium you slap on, it’s genuinely more expensive, slower to scale, and constrained by a shrinking pool of skilled makers. Anyone who thinks “made in Britain” is just a marketing line hasn’t tried to actually staff a factory floor. The reward is real, but so is the difficulty, and pretending otherwise sets brands up to fail.

Do technical and outdoor brands like Buffalo approach sustainability differently to mainstream fashion, and why?

They do, because their products have to actually work, and failure has real consequences when you’re halfway up a mountain. That breeds a culture of durability, repairability, and function that mainstream fashion never needed, because nobody’s life depends on a fast-fashion. The best outdoor brands have repair and longevity in their DNA out of necessity and it just happens to align perfectly with sustainability. Mainstream fashion is having to retrofit values that technical brands were built on.

Finally, if you were advising a young fashion founder, what would you tell them NOT to do?

Don’t compete on newness and price as you’ll lose to people with deeper pockets and fewer scruples. Don’t outsource the thing that makes you distinctive, whether that’s your making, your design, or your relationship with the customer. Be mindful what you produce, as dead stock has killed more promising brands than slow sales ever did. Build something narrow and excellent before you build something big.

James will be supporting Source Fashion in July - get your ticket here