During this time, he did everything from making the coffee and cleaning the stationery cupboard to ordering accessories for the boutique or “belts from hippies”, as Saul puts it.

Now he had a taste for fashion, Saul wasn’t content to stop there.

His father, Michael, a factory manager for Clark’s shoes, pointed him to Borough Road in search of leather. In the blink of an eye, Saul was fashioning butterfly-embroidered snakeskin chokers and saddle skin belts with brass buckles.

MULBERRY IS BORN
That was the beginning. And in 1971, he was gifted the sum of £500 on his 21st Birthday. The Brit-chic fashion brand Mulberry was born, named after the large tree Roger would pass daily on his way to school, with the logo designed by his sister Rosemary.

Saul quickly found himself buying leathers and buckles in Paris and Italy, and having promptly assembled a portfolio of at least a dozen top European designers, he saw their work six months before it hit the catwalk. He was designing around their materials, colours, and shapes. As an accessory designer, it was a dream scenario.

The 70s blazed by with Saul designing, manufacturing, wholesaling, and selling to the boutiques. Mulberry opened offices worldwide, had agents selling on commission, and by the end of the decade, Saul had a Queen’s Award for export to his name.

The business cash-flowed through explosive growth with his mother, Joan, at the helm – but a worldwide recession in the early 1980s saw over half of it disappear overnight. This was to be his most troubling and yet defining moment.

HIGH FASHION
His next stop was to look back on what he had done best, and that was in the mid-1970s when he launched a collection inspired by English country sports like hunting, shooting, and fishing. It was a collection that became iconic. Heralded as ‘Le Style Anglais’, it cemented Mulberry as a cool brand mixing British country style with high fashion.

Saul created the look of hunting bags, saddle girth belts, tweed waistcoats, and leather-collared blouson jackets made from second world war army surplus shirts. It offered something that never previously existed: Casual English, or the ‘dream of Englishness’.

This collection was what brought Mulberry together as a brand. From its first-ever concession within a department store to selling piles of the Mulberry planner (which fast became an iconic product), throughout the 1980s, Mulberry grew by 400%.