As the former boss of his family’s legendary fashion boutique Browns and the current owner of another fashion empire, The Place London, Simon Burstein is used to spotting trends. Now he’s banking on a retro move: preserving book binding skills in this iPad age.

After all, as Burstein points out, people “have a computer but they have a notebook”, too.

He’s even had a royal seal of approval with the Duchess of Edinburgh opening his new bindery on Canvey Island, in Essex, this summer. When she was the Countess of Wessex she was both a boutique and book customer, he says.

Founded in 1919, today’s Charfleet Book Bindery, produces diaries, notebooks, bibles and other stationery for the company’s eight brands.

For example, there’s a green, handcrafted calf leather 2024 diary by Leathersmith of London (£85), and a red hand-bound lizard leather guest book by Organise-Us (£65).

The Charfleet range includes an A5 handbound journal, covered with a vibrant jungle print (£9.95) and Dataday has a flip-over memo pad in six vibrant colours from cherry to orange (£7.85).

Making these books is tougher than it looks, according to Kim Skedge, who cuts the leathers for the covers and has been working with the bindery since 1988.

“We have to get the cut right in the leather and follow its pattern so the book I’m going to deliver has a pattern on it and doesn’t look skew-whiff,” she says.

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Artists Alistair Guy with model Isabella Charlotta Poppius at the bookbinding plant opening (Photo: Dave Benett)

Then there are books made for other companies such as Liberty, which are hand-bound, with hand- cut leather covers, according to Lynn Webb, who oversees the hand case making department, which produces the hard cover cases and who has been working for the bindery since 1964.

Other skills required at the bindery include foil blocking onto covers, an embossing technique that dates to the Middle Ages.

Book edge gilding, meanwhile, was practised as far back as AD400, when monks applied a thin layer of gold leaf on the edges of embellished manuscripts to impress the reader and protect the edges from damp and dust.

Most of the artisans and office staff live on Canvey Island in the Thames estuary, which is why Burstein’s new facility is near the former bindery as “they wouldn’t go anywhere else,” he says.

Some of the employees live near the island’s burgeoning Charedi community.

“They keep themselves to themselves,” says Skedge, who sees them while shopping in her local Morrisons and on the beach.

Some of the employees such as Mark Grimmett are following their family into the craft. He runs the book back lining and book cutting machines in the centre of the new bindery. His father and aunt also worked in the business.

Burstein, 71, has owned Charfleet Book Bindery (and its parent company Canvey Island Book Bindery) since 2015, buying it out of administration with monies from the Browns sale to the online luxury marketplace Farfetch, to “keep a tradition going”, he says.

And having opened 250 Filofax shops in France in the 1980s and 1990s, he bought it with stationery experience. In fact, he actually negotiated the brand’s licence for France.

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The Duchess of Edinburgh with Burstein opening his book-binding factory in Canvey Island (Photos: Dave Benett)

Not for nothing did the French financial newspaper Les Echos dub him
“Monsieur Filofax in France” in 1997.

The threat of the rent doubling on the long-standing previous bindery prompted Burstein to build this new one last year, he says. Machines were dismantled and rebuilt in the new space, placed according to size and usage “to encourage better efficiency”.

Other machines were added to cut new formats, such as the pocket A6 size “so we are able to diversify”, he says, adapting an often used strategy from his fashion roles to balance turnover, he says.

There were challenges too, including no power for the lights or machines from October to December of last year when the building was completed. “The energy companies were refusing to open new contracts, because the prices were moving all the time,” he says. “It was ridiculous.”

Born in Hendon, Burstein grew up in Hampstead. He was educated at the French Lycée because “in the 1950s there was still a quota for Jewish children in private schools and my parents hated the idea that you’d have to declare your religion and be part of a quota”, he says, even though “neither of them spoke French”.

The French education has been a bonus, not least when dealing with French designers, living and working in France and marrying Parisian fashion designer Nathalie Rykiel, daughter of fashion designer Sonia Rykiel. (They have since divorced.)

He has eschewed an active role in the Jewish community, saying he has “never sensed that I needed to lean on that”.

Yet he will “do a seder when [his mother’s] in London and on a Friday night, she’ll get everybody together,” he says of Joan Burstein, Browns’ co-founder, known as Mrs B. His parents ran stores including Neatawear fashion chain and Feathers on Kensington High Street.

Until that is, Burstein suggested they buy a shop on South Molton Street being sold by Sir William Piggott-Brown.

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Burstein with his daughters at the launch party (Photo: Dave Benett)

They re-opened it as Browns in 1970, after which it became a fashion landmark with its connecting and opposite two shops. In 2020, Browns moved to nearby Brook Street.

As the business become known for finding new talent, Burstein’s contribution included hiring a young Paul Smith as a consultant to help start an in-house menswear label and introducing Missoni’s stripey knits into the store and the UK.

And now when he’s making decisions at the bindery, he retains his mother’s golden rule for editing a collection: “When in doubt, cut it out.”

After his stint in Paris with Filofax, he became Browns’ chief executive in 2008, and as vice president of Sonia Rykiel he added accessories to diversify the womenswear brand.

Then, with money from the 2015 Browns sale, he opened The Place London (where the Duchess of Edinburgh shopped for dresses before Covid).
And in 2019, he opened two Charfleet book bindery shops in Paris.

This year, though, retail has been difficult in Paris because, he points out, “of the strikes, the demos… with Parisians leaving the city on Fridays”.

“I was there [in Paris] last month and you get the CRS [Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité], which are the police, who are protecting the towns.

“They come in and have got thousands of these enormous lorries with water tanks and you think you’re going into World War Three. It’s horrible,” he says.

As to the bindery’s future, Burstein plans to recruit an apprentice early next year “to train new people, younger people”, he says. And with his long relationships with colleges, he has the resources at his fingertips.

“I’ll reach out to the [Worshipful Company of] Cordwainers and maybe Goldsmiths,” he says.

And while he admits he is “far from getting a return on my investment [in the bindery business] as it stands”, he remains optimistic.

“I’m playing a long game,” he says.