Abstract: Fibre wrinkle is an unavoidable manufacturing defect in fibre-reinforced composite materials, which leads to a significant reduction in the mechanical properties, particularly the compressive strength, of composite laminates. An in-depth investigation into the effect of fibre wrinkle on compression failure is crucial for the quantitative assessment of compressive strength of composite materials. In this paper, the correlation between wrinkle characteristic parameters and compression failure was studied by numerical analysis and experimental testing. MATLAB and Python scripts were used to create the geometric model with controllable wrinkle geometry in ABAQUS. The damage model with multi-damage mode such as fibre kinking, matrix damage and delamination was established. The effects of fibre wrinkle parameters on compression failure mode and compressive strength of laminates were analyzed based on the damage model. The results show that for both unidirectional (UD) and multidirectional (MD) laminates, the dominant failure mode changes from fibre kinking to delamination with the increase of wrinkle severity. For the studied UD laminates, the threshold of fibre wrinkle angle for failure mode shift lies between 4° and 6°, while that for MD laminates is between 8° and 9°. There exist sensitive and non-sensitive zones for the influence of fibre wrinkle angle and wrinkle area height ratio on compressive strength of UD laminates. When there are multiple wrinkle area in the cross-section of laminates, delamination does not necessarily occur in the most severely wrinkle area. For maximum ply wrinkle angle greater than 45°, delamination is less likely to occur because the peak longitudinal stresses carried by the ply decrease due to ply instability, resulting in a weak interlaminar shearing.