Social enterprise Scottish Design Exchange to help local artists and designers make it big in America

The Scottish Design Exchange, established in 2015 as a profit-for-good venture to provide high street retail space for local artists, designers and artisan food manufacturers, is looking to leverage the “burgeoning demand” for high-quality, independently produced goods in the US market. One of its producers, Between the Woods and the Sea, has already secured a deal with a global retail group to have its Scottish wildlife cushions sold in stores across the US. The group has some 1,000 outlets in the US alone.

Lynzi Leroy, chief executive of the Scottish Design Exchange (SDX), was selected by the Scottish Business Network as one of its two representatives at Tartan Week in New York last month. The venture has emerged as a high street success story of late with sales more than doubling in the last 12 months to £4 million, following the launch of two new outlets, including at the Tron Kirk on Edinburgh’s historic Royal Mile, and a new spin-out business, Foodies, in Glasgow’s Buchanan Galleries.

SDX tenants pay a small, fixed, monthly fee to rent space in its city centre stores, and they keep 100 per cent of their sales. The seven-days-a-week permanent art market space, based at the Tron Kirk building on the Royal Mile, is said to have proved an outstanding success, generating record takings for its 21 small businesses since it opened last July. SDX also has large stores in Edinburgh and Glasgow.

Leroy, a former project manager for Shell, who launched SDX as a single outlet in Leith in 2015, said there was a burgeoning market in the US for high quality goods made by independent Scottish producers, both within and out with the Scottish diaspora. She organised meetings with distributors during Tartan Week to explore potential opportunities for Scottish artists to showcase and sell their products in the US wholesale market.

She said: “We’ve got a good thing going on, and the trip to New York presented a fantastic opportunity to delve deeper. I was eager to explore the wholesale market for our artists, to see if there were avenues for them to tap into in the US and it was a great success, with many new potential avenues of trade opening up to us.

“We have already witnessed one major success story with our North Berwick based tenant Lainey Miller, of Between the Woods and the Sea, which has secured a significant order through a US-based retail company, indicating a promising market for Scottish artwork across the Atlantic.”

Miller added: “I’ve been with SDX since the beginning. Joining The Tron on the Royal Mile was a big step change for us, but SDX supported us every step of the way. Around 90 per cent of my original paintings are shipped to America. The buyers saw my work at the Tron and I’m sure there are lots of opportunities for other Scottish artists to have their work in the US.”

Artists set for record £3.5m boost thanks to success of Scottish Design Exchange enterprise