RECLAIM Mallorca: Stitching Stories of Heritage, Sustainability, and Resistance

omen only get 2% of funding, yet we outperform our male counterparts by 35%," states Sarah Rennison Gwynne-Harris, founder of RECLAIM Mallorca, a lifestyle brand that repurposes vintage fabrics and surplus leather and horse tack into luxury bags and accessories. The business started as a passion project, born from a desire to help a friend save his horse. Pep, a recently retired saddle maker, ran a small leather shop in Santa Catalina, where Rennison was living at the time. When she learned he might have to sell his horse due to the 2008 financial crisis, which was affecting businesses across the island, she had a middle-of-the-night brainstorm.

"I came to Mallorca after years of travelling and collecting pieces of fabric from everywhere. I had piles of textiles oozing out of every corner in my small studio," she says. "I thought, hang on—these fabrics, the horse tack... I sketched out the idea and ran over to his workshop in the morning. He thought it was a really dumb idea at first," she laughs. She paid him to make the first bags using old military canvas with leather fixtures. They sold out in the first two months at bconnected, where she was working. "I had great feedback from clients because I never told them they were mine, so they were honest about what they liked or didn't," she says. Pep taught her to sew, and slowly the brand started to grow. A feature in the Financial Times' "How to Spend It" in 2016 launched her brand on a more international level.

About seven years ago, Rennison took over a former shoe factory in Lloseta—a spacious, light-filled space with large wooden shelves now filled with various models, fabrics, and materials. Today, she sources many of her fabrics through a network of antiques dealers across Europe who collect and ship textiles they think she'll like. She also receives out-of-the-blue emails and calls from admirers of the brand. Recently, someone in Spain called to offer leather horse tack from stables that were closing near their house. They loved what RECLAIM was doing and wanted to give the leather a second life.

Courtesy RECLAIM Mallorca

Pouches for RELAIM Iran

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ennison's love of horses and equestrian lifestyle comes from her Welsh roots. She grew up immersed in the culture and has cousins and family members breeding racehorses, trotting ponies, and Welsh cobs. Although she left home at 17 to forge her own path in the world, that connection still runs deep. The brand conveys a sense of that British riding heritage but is firmly grounded in Mallorca—particularly in the fabrics, hundreds of which Rennison has gathered from across the island over the years, from flea markets to estate sales to friends of friends giving her textiles in hopes she can use them. Each bag conveys generations of history—from the vintage fabrics that once graced the walls or furniture of a family home, to handworked leather, to the hands sewing the final details.

Rennison currently has a steady team of seven women who sew the bags and accessories, producing about 15-20 bags a week. "But," she explains, "we have the capacity to expand up to 10,000 bags a year." This brings us back to her interest in expanding the business—and the small percentage of funding allocated to women-led businesses. Over the last several years, she has received investment offers, but most were exploitative, ready to turn RECLAIM into a fast-fashion brand and sequester profits for themselves. She has also seen her proposals shut down simply because she's a woman, a harsh reality faced by many female-led businesses. "People, including from LVMH, have said to me, 'When the brand gets to this level, call me and we can discuss funding,'" she says. "But I can't get to that level without first having some funding." It's a catch-22, and one many people with small-to-mid-sized brands face. Rennison is clear about what needs to change: "We need women who fund past this barrier—women investors who get in early so they also have access to the resulting benefits. Why can I only play in the big field when I am at a certain level? Women should create a parallel world where they support each other's businesses and advance the field altogether."

While in the midst of trying to raise money for RECLAIM Mallorca, Rennison had an unexpected encounter at a Christmas party. A compliment on a guest's skirt fabric led to the development of RECLAIM Iran, a fundraising initiative to help send money to an NGO in Iran.

"I came to Mallorca after years of travelling and collecting pieces of fabric from everywhere. I had piles of textiles oozing out of every corner in my small studio."

Photo by Ana Lui, Courtesy RECLAIM Mallorca

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fter protests erupted in 2023, when Mahsa Amini was murdered for a few strands of hair slipping from beneath her hijab, Rennison explains how "it struck me differently than other stories had. Not because it was unprecedented—it wasn't—but because of how ordinary it was. How small the 'offence' was. How familiar." The woman Rennison had complimented at the party happened to be a member of the Qajar family—Iran's first royal lineage. Together they came up with the idea of using traditional royal fabrics made in Iran to create pouches and raise money for the protests. Discreetly embroidered inside each pouch was the name of a woman who had lost her life in the uprising. An Iranian artist living in the country contributed an artwork of a woman, arm raised in defiance, holding her shorn hair inside a red circle. In six weeks they had developed RECLAIM Iran. All of the pouches sold out, and money was sent directly back into Iran through trusted, women-led networks, despite PayPal attempting to block and dismantle accounts. The project received extensive international attention.

All of this was happening when Rennison was told on a call with a Los Angeles-based VC firm, at 11 p.m. at night, that she would not receive the funding she had been pitching for months. "A woman delivered the message, an Indian woman, herself shaped by a culture that knows repression intimately. She explained, calmly, that if I had walked in with an idea scribbled on the back of a piece of paper as a man, I would likely have been funded. But as a woman—even with everything built, proven, and planned—I needed to be 'realistic.' I would not raise 1.5 million."

It is hard to process in 2026 that this barrier still remains as high as ever, but Rennison keeps on with her energy and ideas, and RECLAIM Mallorca continues to establish itself as a model for purpose-led businesses. "I am not in business because I want to buy yachts. I want to leave the world better than I found it. The purpose of the brand is not to exploit. I want to build it with people who see it like I see it."

RECLAIM Mallorca

@reclaimmallorca

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