KIRSTY GLENNE has spent the past four years doing something that sounds deceptively simple: reminding people that Antler is British. Founded in 1914 and owned since 2020 by Australian accessories group Strandbags, the brand had spent decades on shelves without buyers grasping the legacy they were packing their clothes in. The rich heritage behind it – the archive, the craftsmanship, the century-plus of knowing how to make a case that lasts – had been lost somewhere between London and Sydney.

Glenne’s work, as then-Managing Director, was to bring all of that forward. The campaigns, the product design, the brand voice: each element considered, each one traceable back to something real. It has been, by any measure, a studied and sustained repositioning. The message at Antler now is the quintessential British travelling accessory, from the misty campaigns shot in the English countryside to the colour palette (green, of course).

Esquire caught up with Glenne at the Capella Hotel in Sydney, where Glenne has arrived for a few days of meetings with the brand’s Australian team and local wholesale partners. She is dressed exactly as you might expect of someone whose life runs on aeroplane schedules and back-to-back engagements: denim, a white shirt, flats. A wardrobe that moves easily between a suitcase and a wardrobe. The trunk and cabin she arrived with, both Antler, naturally, are sitting upstairs.

Despite having lived in London for decades, the signature lilt of her native Scotland is still strong. Which makes it all the more enjoyable that when pushed, halfway into our conversation, on where exactly her own cultural allegiances lie. 

Is she British or Scottish?

She drops her voice the slightest bit: “Scottish,” she replies.

Out on the wild, windy moors we’d roll and fall in green…

The reason the exchange matters is what she said next. Antler’s first campaign under her leadership involved loading a vintage Land Rover and driving it from London – specifically from just outside the location that would later become the brand’s Regent Street flagship – all the way north to the Hebridean islands. A journey from the centre of one version of Britain to the outer edges of another. As origin stories go, it suited the brand rather well.

Glenne joined Antler in 2022, having previously held senior roles at Alexander McQueen – where she worked closely with Jonathan Akeroyd – and later as Chief Client and Digital Officer at Dr. Barbara Sturm. The move into luggage raised a few eyebrows. 

“Some people on paper could say that sounded a little bit crazy,” she acknowledged. 

Her argument, however, was straightforward: Antler had a story to tell, and in a market crowded with brands assembled from warehouse components and seasonal palettes, that was a genuine asset. 

“To have the asset of a story to tell, it’s quite unique and a massive value to a business.”

What she found was a 112-year-old British brand that had spent decades in Australia without many realising it was British at all. It had become, as she put it, a luggage brand without its rich past. Her brief, self-assigned, was to go back into the archive, identify what made the brand distinct, and bring it forward in a way that was relevant without abandoning what it actually was. “We really had to work quite hard to go into the archive, understand what it was, and pull out the best bits,” she says.

The result has been deliberate and cumulative. Antler green – a colour the brand now repeats across its product DNA – communicates Britishness in a very British way: subtly. The Antler stripe, a 40-millimetre groove running along the case, links to archival trunk designs while adding structural rigidity. 

Every detail, Glenne noted, has a reason. “I can tell you why every single piece of the case exists.” 

Whereas many brands in the category pull components off a factory shelf, Antler designs in-house and traces each element back to its heritage. The lifetime warranty, she pointed out, is something the brand can offer precisely because it has been making luggage for over a century. “We know how to make luggage way more than all these emerging challenger brands that have been here for five minutes.”

The visual language she has built around the brand reflects that same thinking. Campaigns have placed the product in landscapes – the Scottish Highlands, the coast of Wales, Snowdonia – with a commitment to showing the luggage in the environments it was designed for, rather than in airport lounges or photographic studios. The Discovery collection, a newer active-oriented line, was shot with an older barefoot runner in Snowdonia: a deliberate juxtaposition of age and movement that resists the easy signifiers of outdoor gear marketing.

It is, in the truest sense of the phrase, luxury. 

“You just don’t need the loud badge to say you spend $3,000,” she said. 

Younger consumers, in particular, have responded to that restraint. Luggage has moved, for many, from functional commodity to considered purchase – an extension of how someone travels and how they look doing it. 

“Today luggage is more than a commodity,” Glenne said. “It’s an extension of yourself. It’s a symbol of your whole look, your style.”

Last month, the brand celebrated the opening of its first Regent Street flagship – 100 Regent Street, naturally – designed in collaboration with Checkland Kindleysides. Natural materials, a micro-cement finish and a floral installation by British artist Hamish Powell have transformed into something considered and unhurried. A stillness before the adrenalin of travel. 

Coinciding with the opening, Antler introduced its Monogram – a geometric print derived from the brand’s stag logo, developed with reference to British modernist artists Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth. It launched in signature green, archival coral and warm white, exclusive to Regent Street.

When we spoke, Glenne was Managing Director. Several days after our conversation, Antler announced her appointment as Chief Executive Officer of Antler House of Brands – a newly structured group encompassing Antler, recently acquired US luxury travel brand Paravel, and Australian travel brand Nere. The promotion felt less like news and more like confirmation. Under her tenure, global revenue grew from £5 million to £52 million over four years, with Australia accounting for 40 per cent of global sales. 

The US, meanwhile, grew by 83 per cent in the most recent financial year alone.

Antler had travelled the world.

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