Why A Shetland Brand Project?
During the 1990s, there was a growing realisation that Shetland, in various ways, wasn’t making much impact in the marketplace. For example, there had been long-standing difficulties over the use of the name ‘Shetland’ in connection with knitwear. A brand involving the ‘Shetland Lady’ had been introduced, and had some success, but in a sense it served to confirm that Shetland had lost control of its identity. Another example comes from the salmon farming sector. We’d built an early reputation as a place that produced better salmon than other areas. However, that was gradually diluted as multinational firms increasingly used Shetland as a place in which to grow fish that were either ‘Scottish’ or simply anonymous. At the same time, people in Shetland were becoming ever more aware that other areas had been much more successful at making a name for themselves. The most frequently-cited example was Orkney; their products were identified as Orcadian in the marketplace and the various elemen
