Byredo expands beyond London with Victoria Leeds flagship
The new space, located in Victoria Quarter — already home to Aesop, Jo Malone, and Mulberry — signals Byredo's confidence in the northern market's appetite for elevated beauty and lifestyle products. It follows the brand's successful concession within Harvey Nichols Leeds, where sustained footfall and strong sales performance provided a reliable proof of concept.
Best known for its minimalist bottles and conceptual scent narratives, Byredo has built a loyal global following since its founding in 2006 by Ben Gorham. Acquired in 2022 by Puig, the brand remains emblematic of the niche fragrance category — one that continues to outperform the broader beauty market. According to market research firm NPD Group, prestige niche fragrance sales in the UK grew 13 percent year-on-year in 2023, compared to 7 percent growth in mass-market fragrance. This trend is further amplified by Gen Z and Millennial consumers, who are drawn to the artisanal positioning, perceived authenticity, and layered storytelling of independent brands.
The Leeds opening will see Byredo expand its physical retail experience to include not only its core fragrance line, but also cosmetics, home goods, leather accessories, and small luxuries — part of a deliberate shift toward full lifestyle branding. The move dovetails with Puig's strategy of cultivating vertical retail experiences to drive both brand equity and margin control.
'The luxury nature of Byredo means they will be a perfect fit with our leading tenant mix," commented Rachel Bradburn, leasing director at Victoria Leeds. "Yet another strategic brand decision to launch its first standalone store outside of London. Byredo's flagship further cements Victoria Quarter as the go-to premier destination for luxury brands.'
Victoria Leeds has been steadily positioning itself as a regional luxury hub, with recent arrivals such as Aesop and the announcement that sustainable womenswear label Nobody's Child will also open its first northern store there. These moves reflect a growing recalibration of retail geography, as brands increasingly seek to balance London flagship dominance with broader national relevance — and direct-to-consumer economics.
For Byredo, the Leeds opening is less a test case than an assertion: niche beauty has matured, and its market is no longer confined to urban centres or online exclusivity. In a post-pandemic retail environment where experience, locality, and curation are gaining renewed importance, the move underscores a simple truth — niche is no longer niche. It's the new mainstream, and it's going regional.
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The Independent
21 minutes ago
- The Independent
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Scotsman
21 minutes ago
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Times
22 minutes ago
- Times
Dame Steve Shirley obituary: From Kindertransport to the Rich List
Long before flexible working, job shares and working from home entered the employment lexicon, they were the norm at F International (FI). The computer software company was founded as Freelance Programmers in 1962 by Stephanie 'Steve' Shirley, a refugee from Nazi Germany, on her kitchen table with only £6 of capital funding. 'I had no experience of running a company. I had no employees, no office, no customers, and no reason to believe that there were any companies out there with any interest in buying my product,' she said. Her market was companies needing software to run their operations, a vast but uncharted territory that eventually included complex public sector projects such as the black box for Concorde. 'If a company wanted to improve its efficiency by using a computer, what mattered wasn't the hardware it bought but the programme, the software, that told it what to do,' she explained in her memoir Let It Go (with Richard Askwith, 2012). Fed up with the sexism she had experienced in the workplace, Shirley went many years before employing men, only relenting in the face of sex-discrimination legislation. 'It became a mission not just to survive economically, but to show that an organisation run by women could keep up,' she said. An added attraction was that working from home 'might well be compatible with raising children'. At first business was slow. Some American companies were familiar with outsourcing and one of her first clients was Mars. British ones were suspicious of an organisation that did not sell a physical product and even more so of doing business with someone called Stephanie. Her husband Derek, whose signature she needed to open a bank account, suggested that she sign her letters Steve. 'That certainly helped me to get a foot in the door,' she said. Sales rose and the name stuck. Being taken seriously was not easy. 'It is certainly hard to sell a major product to someone who is also trying to pinch your bottom,' she told The Sunday Times. She took to dressing 'like an honorary man, in grey suits and white blouse'. Gradually contracts trickled in, helped by a 1966 feature on the BBC programme Tomorrow's World. British Railways commissioned a study of its nationwide freight service. Another job involved optimising the scheduling of Tate & Lyle sugar lorries around the country. 'Decades later, I still feel a stab of panic if I see a Tate & Lyle lorry on a country road, in case it is lost,' she wrote. Her designers developed wiring systems for British Aerospace aircraft in the Falklands conflict, stock control systems for Lyons bakeries and Mothercare, a programme for monitoring sewers and another enabling Citizens Advice Bureaux to offer benefits advice. By the mid-1980s, 94 per cent of those working for FI were women, more than half of whom had children under school age. 'We get more work per hour out of our employees as they concentrate hard in bursts when they are at their most creative,' she told the journalist Polly Toynbee. On one occasion she was about to sell up, but withdrew when the new owner refused to register the company crèche. However, Shirley was not only running FI but also dealing with the stress of caring for Giles, her severely autistic son. At one point she spent eight months working from his hospital bedside. On other occasions a recording of typing masked his cries from telephone callers. Things became so bad that she and Derek considered taking their own lives and their son's, but withdrew because Giles could not consent. In 1976 the pressure became too much and she had a nervous breakdown and was admitted to hospital. With caring for Giles at home no longer possible he was placed in an institution until she was able to fund a residential home for people with autism, the first of many philanthropic ventures. FI grew into a company employing 1,000 people with several 'work centres' around the country open 24 hours a day. Work was measured in time, but not subject to rigid hours. Shirley went on to develop an employee ownership model, in part inspired by John Lewis of which she was later a non-executive director, and by 1987 employee ownership had reached 24 per cent. After the company floated in 1996, more than 50 of them became millionaires. All this brought more wealth than she had ever imagined, as well as entry into a different world. One financial adviser wanted to make inroads into her tax liabilities to justify a large fee for himself, but she preferred paying tax than paying him. The same adviser suggested that a divorce from her husband would be 'more tax efficient' while another scorned her insistence on reading the small print to become a Lloyd's name, an opportunity for ruin that she thus avoided. By 1999 Shirley was 376th on The Sunday Times Rich List with an estimated fortune of £63 million, making her the 22nd richest woman in Britain and the second richest self-made one, after Ann Gloag of Stagecoach. She then made it her goal to drop off the list by giving away as much as possible through the Shirley Foundation. As well as many projects involved in the understanding and treatment of autism, she supported the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists and the Oxford Internet Institute. As she told The Guardian in 2004: 'Money that is not working has an obscenity about it.' She was born Vera Stephanie Buchthal in Dortmund, Germany, in 1933, the younger of two daughters of Arnold Buchthal, a Jewish high court judge, and his Gentile wife Grete (née Schick), who was also well educated. By then the doors were closing in on Arnold's career, partly because of his Jewishness and partly because of his open contempt for National Socialism. The family were forced to move from city to city and country to country, eventually settling in Perchtoldsdorf, near the Vienna Woods. In March 1938 Austria was annexed by the Third Reich and in July 1939 Vera and her sister Renate were among the 10,000 children rescued by the Kindertransport. A few weeks earlier their father had received a visit from the Gestapo and within days had fled on foot over the mountains to Switzerland, 'like the von Trapp family in The Sound of Music', leaving their mother free from being considered Jewish or anti-Nazi. Both parents survived to reach England but separated soon afterwards and Vera never really bonded with either again. She arrived at Liverpool Street station on a grey July day with an infected wound in her big toe and the yellow star of David still sewn on her coat. Her father had taught her some English phrases, such as 'windscreen wiper' and 'slow combustion stove', but she 'had no idea how to ask to go to the toilet, let alone how to understand strangers' explanations about what was going to happen to us'. The sisters were raised in Little Aston, in the West Midlands, by Guy and Ruby Smith, a middle-aged, nominally Anglican couple with limited education. They had no experience of childcare and spoke no German. 'Yet they were, in their stolid way, a lovely couple,' Vera wrote. Within a couple of months she had picked up enough English to enrol at the village school. Later she attended a convent school near Sutton Coldfield and a grammar school in Oswestry. At 18 she started using her middle name, Stephanie, and anglicised her surname to Brook. Renate later emigrated to Australia, became a social worker for traumatised children and died in 1996. From school she joined the Post Office research station at Dollis Hill, northwest London, where she was involved in developing Ernie, the computer used to pick Premium Bond winners, and with the first electronic telephone exchanges. After a couple of years she decided to acquire a maths degree the hard way, through night school and day release course at the Sir John Cass College, and in 1957 was a founding member of the British Computer Society. After a series of unsatisfactory affairs, including one with a married man, and therapy at the Tavistock Institute, she met Derek Shirley, a Post Office physicist. They were married in 1959. In those days it was considered inappropriate for a husband and wife to work in the same organisation so she moved to Computer Developments Ltd, a subsidiary of ICL, at Kenton, near Harrow, working in software development. Derek died in 2021 and their son, Giles, died in 1998 aged 35. CDL was progressive for its time, allowing Shirley to work a four-day week, but the glass ceiling was hard to ignore. 'It was quite clear to me that I could not progress far,' she said. In one meeting she was cut short by a senior man, who told her: 'That's nothing to do with you. You're technical.' She resigned the following morning to start Freelance Programmers, which in 1974 became FI, the F variously standing in her mind for freelance, flexible or female. FI continued to thrive after its flotation, becoming Xansa plc during a fashion for corporate rebranding. By 2000 it was valued at almost $3 billion and is now part of Sopra Steria, a French company. Meanwhile, Shirley's philanthropy continued and in 2009 she took a one-year role as the first government-appointed ambassador for philanthropy, with the aim of encouraging a broader culture of giving. 'The more I give,' she concluded, 'the richer my life becomes.' Dame Steve Shirley CH, software pioneer and philanthropist, was born on September 16, 1933. She died after a short illness on August 9, 2025, aged 91
