The Towel Nobody Questions

I’ll admit something: until I started digging into this, I always assumed Wimbledon’s towels were as British as the grass they’re played on. Green and purple, folded neatly on courtside chairs, handed to players between points on Centre Court, surely something that quintessentially English had to be made in England. Turns out I was wrong, and honestly, so is almost everyone else who’s ever watched the Championships.

For more than fifteen years now, every single official Wimbledon towel has been woven, dyed and finished not anywhere near London, but in a town called Vapi, tucked away in the Indian state of Gujarat. Not a small side detail either, every towel, every year, for well over a decade.

How a Manchester Brand Ended Up in Gujarat

The story starts with a company called Christy, and it really does start as British as you’d expect. Founded back in 1850 as a cotton mill in Manchester, Christy spent the better part of a century building a name for itself as the towel-maker of choice for people who cared about that sort of thing: soft, well-made, properly British. At one point they even wove towels for the monarchy. So when Wimbledon needed an official towel supplier back in 1988, Christy was the obvious pick, and production stayed right there in Manchester for years.

Then, in 2006, everything shifted. An Indian textile company called Welspun, now known as Welspun Living, bought Christy outright. What’s interesting is that Welspun didn’t touch the brand’s British image at all; they kept the heritage story exactly as it was. What they moved was the actual manufacturing. By around 2009, production had relocated from Hyde, near Manchester, to Welspun’s facility in Vapi. Some accounts place the full switch closer to 2010, but either way, the practical result has held steady since: the towel’s identity stayed British, its birthplace became Indian.

This isn’t some quiet, temporary arrangement either. In 2024, Welspun’s Vapi facility actually marked fifteen years of making the Wimbledon towel, a proper milestone, celebrated internally, that tells you this has become a genuinely permanent part of how the tournament runs.

Why Nobody Seems to Notice

Here’s the part I found almost funny once I understood it: Christy has never stopped leaning into its Manchester origin story. Go to their website, read their marketing, and you’d think every towel still came off a loom somewhere in Greater Manchester. The heritage narrative simply never updated to reflect where the actual weaving happens now. It’s a pretty common thing in global manufacturing: if you think about it, the story a brand tells about itself often has almost nothing to do with where the physical object actually gets made. For Wimbledon, that gap between story and supply chain runs straight through Gujarat.

What Actually Goes Into Making One

I wasn’t expecting the process behind these towels to be as involved as it is. Design work for each year’s towel starts about eighteen months ahead of time; Christy’s design team works with international trend forecasters well before a single thread gets dyed. The 2024 towel, for instance, used a shade called “Hyacinth & Lavender,” chosen specifically with input from the trend group WGSN because it was meant to feel calming and mood-boosting. The year before that, it was a hot pink. Clearly, this isn’t an afterthought; someone genuinely treats the colour choice each year as a real design decision.

The towels themselves are made using yarn-dyed jacquard weaving, and each one takes roughly a week from start to finish. There are actually two versions released every Championship: the classic green-and-purple everyone recognises, and that year’s new seasonal colourway. Since 2021, every player gets both; the unisex approach replaced the older system where men’s towels stuck to green, purple and gold while women’s towels rotated through a new palette annually.

Underneath all that design work is Christy’s own fabric technology, called HygroCotton, finely spun cotton yarns engineered to be extra absorbent and quick-drying, which makes sense given what these towels actually have to do on court. There’s a sustainability angle too: the towels carry Oeko-Tex “Made in Green” certification, meaning they’re verified free of harmful substances and produced under proper ecological and labour standards, and Christy has cut unnecessary plastic from the packaging in favour of FSC-certified card.

A Global Business Wearing a British Face

What struck me most, honestly, is how openly Welspun talks about this arrangement, just not in the direction you’d expect. The company has described the Wimbledon partnership as proof of how central Indian manufacturing has become to global sourcing and supply chains, which is a very different framing from the “Heritage British Towel” story that Christy sells to consumers. Both things are true at once, and neither company seems bothered by the contradiction.

There’s a sustainability side to the partnership too. The Wimbledon Foundation has committed £1.2 million over three years to the charity WaterAid, and separately, Welspun has made one of its other plants, in Anjar, completely independent of freshwater use through its own sewage treatment facility.

The two companies have also used the relationship to mark bigger moments in Wimbledon’s history. In 2022, to celebrate a hundred years of tennis at Centre Court, they designed a limited edition Centenary Towel, drawing directly on the original 1922 architectural drawings and finishing it with old-gold thread detailing, a nice touch, given how much the whole story is really about honouring the past while quietly reshaping how it’s made.

Why This Actually Matters

At the end of the day, a towel is a small thing. Players use it to wipe sweat between points; fans buy it as a souvenir because it’s instantly recognisable. But once you know what’s actually behind it, it becomes a pretty neat window into how global brands work now. Christy gets to keep its 175-year-old British story fully intact, while the real work, the weaving, the dyeing, the innovation in fabric technology, happens on the other side of the world, in a country that rarely gets credit for it.

Wimbledon likes to present itself as the most British stage in world sport, and in plenty of ways it still is. But one of its most iconic, most photographed objects tells a very different story about where things actually get made these days, and it’s one worth knowing, next time you see a player toss that towel into the crowd.

References:

1. Welspun Living. “Luxury Towels with a Legacy | Welspun & Wimbledon.”
2. Gulf News. “Wimbledon’s Iconic Towels Have Been Made in Gujarat, India for 17 Years: Inside the Craftsmanship Behind a British Tennis Symbol.”
3. PR Newswire. “Welspun India Designs Special Towels To Mark Wimbledon’s 100 Years At Centre Court,” July 8, 2022.
4. ANI/The Print. “Welspun India designs special towels to mark Wimbledon’s 100 years at Centre Court,” July 8, 2022.
5. Khel Today. “From Welspun India to The World – Wimbledon’s Classic Souvenir!,” June 30, 2022.
6. SportzPower. “Wimbledon towels get a Welspun ‘refresh’ for ’24 Championships,” July 5, 2024.
   

   .    .    .