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Fashion United
26-05-2025
- Business
- Fashion United
Patrick Grant's Community Clothing to launch crowdfunding campaign
Community Clothing, the brand owned by Great British Sewing Bee's Patrick Grant, has announced its intention to launch a crowdfunding campaign. In a post on its website, the company said that it has partnered with the platform Crowdcube on the initiative, with which it intends to 'give everyone the opportunity to become shareholders'. The brand's crowdfunding page currently allows those interested in investing to gain early access to the campaign and submit the amount they hope to invest once it begins. In its profile, Community Clothing said its mission 'is to change the narrative around what we wear', while also 'supporting and creating local jobs' to 'help restore prosperity in communities across the UK'. It is exactly this that has been at the heart of the brand's mission since it was founded nine years ago. According to its website, the company has 'created well over 400,000 hours of skilled work' in the UK, but it wishes to do more. Over the past three years, meanwhile, its sales and impact has grown 400 percent. Community Clothing's story began in 2015 when Grant, a cloth merchant, purchased Lancashire clothing manufacturer Cookson & Clegg. The company found a partner in Selfridges by 2017 and continued to collaborate with other brands and firms, including the Homegrown/Homespun project, which launched growing flax and natural dyes. Community Clothing now has partner factories in Ayrshire, Bolton and South Wales.
The Guardian
19-05-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
The retailer who wants us to buy less: Patrick Grant on his fight against fast fashion
Patrick Grant is on his feet, giving the full tour of his outfit. He tugs down the waistband of his jeans to show off his white underpants elastic. His undies were made in south Wales, he says. His shoes in Bolton, the socks in Sussex. More than a man who got dressed this morning, he is a walking compendium of clothing. The provenance of his garments is important to Grant. In fact, the provenance of his everything is important. We are meeting in the office of Cookson & Clegg, the Blackburn clothing factory he bought in 2015. Within a few minutes, I've learned that the table we're sitting at came from Freecycle in Crystal Palace, the bookcase from a skip. I suspect these details have always mattered to Grant,53, who is best known as a judge on The Great British Sewing Bee, but they're especially pertinent since his book, Less, argues that we should all buy fewer things. Grant is very exercised about this idea, and the book's affably bossy subtitle is a much better clue to his personal energy than its minimalist title: Stop Buying So Much Rubbish: How Having Fewer, Better Things Can Make Us Happier. Less is a sort of anti-shopping guide, a plea to think very carefully before we part with our cash. Which might seem surprising given that Grant has himself for 20 years been a retailer, designer and clothing manufacturer. But his businesses have emphasised quality over quantity – he bought Norton & Sons, a Savile Row tailor, in 2005 after seeing it advertised for sale in the back of the Financial Times. And in 2016, he launched Community Clothing, a for-profit social enterprise. While the aim is to make a profit, its declared focus is 'creating jobs'. All the clothes are made at UK factories, in an effort to help revitalise industrial regions. Last week it launched a crowdfunding campaign. What it's very much not about is fashion. 'The whole idea of fashion with a big 'F' is a deliberate act on the part of commercial businesses to encourage people to buy things they don't need,' Grant says. That's how we ended up with fast fashion and 'this acceleration and shitification of the whole thing'. At Community Clothing, there are no sales or seasons. In style terms, it's a collection of high-quality basics, like the luxury brand Sunspel but at a third of the price. Grant,, comes across as a thoughtful provider of goods rather than a salesman. When I say I have my eye on a couple of things on the website, he asks sternly, 'What do you need?' The philosophy he sets out is simple. We should make things locally, and make things to last, thereby taking better care of both our planet and local communities. 'Pretty much every government I can remember has fallen back on the idea that if we can just get the economy growing, everything will be great. And of course, that's complete nonsense,' he says. 'We've had a growing economy for the last 50-odd years and most people don't feel any better off at all. Most of the growth is coming from businesses that don't give anything back to the average citizen of Britain.' Instead, it would be 'simple for us to consume differently … we can simply choose to buy less.' But surely it isn't that simple? The reasons we shop are complex. 'I think you're right,' he says cheerfully. 'I've oversimplified.' Grant hardly buys anything himself. With his trademark side parting and finely trimmed moustache, he is supremely well turned out, but he can't remember the last time he stepped into a clothes shop and came out with something. He only goes in charity shops. Each day he puts on a navy crew neck – a uniform that's his equivalent of the Steve Jobs turtleneck – and a pair of Community Clothing trousers, usually khaki or beige 'cameraman pants' or 'army pants'. (All the trousers here have jobs.) The washing machine doesn't appear to intervene too much. 'Most days I just have fresh pants and socks, and the same stuff as yesterday. Every other day, or every third day, I'll change my T-shirt.' I can't help wondering if the morning will come when Grant leaps out of bed, throws open the doors to his wardrobe and recoils in horror at how boring it all looks. 'I don't know,' he says thoughtfully. 'Occasionally I do wear a bright sweatshirt. A really lovely cobalt sweatshirt.' But maybe he has a dark past – or in his case a really colourful one. Because some years ago he complained in an interview about the 'very drab palette' of menswear. 'Oh! Don't believe the crap I've said in the past,' he says merrily. He did love fashion, though. 'I used to wear some quite high fashion stuff.' As a teenager growing up in Morningside, Edinburgh, he stuck pictures torn from Vogue on his wall (Béatrice Dalle, Kristin Scott Thomas) and saved up to shop the sales. 'In the late 80s, early 90s, I had bits of Issey Miyake, quite a few bits of Jean Paul Gaultier, bits of Vivienne Westwood. I had those beautiful high-waisted stripy pirate trousers. Jean Paul Gaultier did these really narrow, carroty-shaped jeans.' He's on a roll now. 'I had a couple of those in a few different colours. Burgundy. Blue. Maybe I had three pairs … And I had a pair of Jacquard denim Gaultier jeans that had all these faces over them …' More recently, according to Less, he owned American Apparel Y-fronts in 15 colours. 'Oh, I did! Obviously I wasn't sad about the demise of American Apparel when it became clear what was going on there. But those colourful Y-fronts were good quality,' he says. In fact, the Y-front is the only object for which Grant expresses a strong and unmet yearning. He tried to sell them at Community Clothing, but everyone bought the boxers instead. 'I'd hoped the Y-fronts would be in the mix,' he says sadly. Why? 'Well, because I like them personally.' That's tough, I say. Because they would seem to be one item that's never coming back. 'No,' he says quickly. 'They are the most comfortable thing to wear by absolutely miles. And I actually think they're more flattering than boxers. They make your legs look longer, they make your tummy smaller. Sadly, the Y-front has been consigned to the substitutes bench for now.' But at some point, he says, they will bring them back. Grant can wax lyrical about almost anything from a salt pot to a potato or the 'lovely little snouty kiss marks' his pigs Hazel and Acorn leave on his trousers; he acquired them to clear the brambles from the garden of his home near Settle, North Yorkshire, which he has been making over for the past eight years. The start of the book is basically a hymn to all the things that make him happy, a litany drawn from a miscellany, from the burgundy sweatshirt his gran found for him in a charity shop to the sign in the Cookson & Clegg kitchenette that says, 'Please don't put wet teaspoons in the coffee'. He is equally passionate about the things he hates. The big bete noires are online marketplace Temu and ultra-fast fashion label Shein, with their hundreds of thousands of new products a year, 'selling huge amounts of stuff but with almost no value at all going into the UK economy'. But he is very even-handed, and equally ready to take aim at the odd national treasure. Burberry has previously come under fire, and today Marks & Spencer, for instance, is 'a great example of somebody who used to do clothes who now consider themselves a purveyor of fashion. And I think they've got it wrong … They've decided that the way to compete is to out-advertise and out-market people. They've given up on the thing we [at Community Clothing] do, which is: make good product, try to sell it at a price people can afford.' Community Clothing currently has about 100,000 customers but 'I would be quite keen that everyone was able to buy a few pairs of pants and socks from us', Grant says, which makes it sound a bit like out-Marks-&-Spencering M&S. He can get worked up about anything, all with a sort of deadly serious but cheerfully good-natured disapproval. Sports brands? 'We're using recycled polyester! Whoop-de-doo!' Clothes moths. Kettles – always breaking. Tesco baking trays. The rabbits who last year ate everything he grew apart from the potatoes, triggering his 'Mr McGregor side'. The full Windsor – 'an ugly tie knot, the wrong shape for the way a shirt is cut.' Nutribullets: 'just really shit-quality blenders'. Then there's the Cotswold village of Great Tew, where he shared a second home with ex-girlfriend Katie Hillier before the Soho Farmhouse members' club 'somewhat changed the dynamic of the neighbourhood' and the 'white Range Rovers came flying down the road at 90mph'. He says all this, managing to look lordly while eating an eccles cake. (He's also gossipy. 'The Beckhams bought a really shit plot of land on the corner of a main road,' he says, chuckling. 'Nicholas Johnston [who owns the estate] absolutely pulled their pants down.') He comes across as both homespun and high-end. He darns his own jumpers, and happily pushes up his T-shirt sleeves to reveal his 'farmer's tan' and forearms 'like blocks of wood' from all the pickaxe work he's been doing in his garden – where he's hoping to lay, of all things, a croquet lawn. 'I do love a bit of sport,' he says. He's a sort of Renaissance man. The martial arts segment of his sporting CV alone includes taekwondo, kung fu, karate and judo, until he tore cartilage in his knee 'sparring with a very large Ukrainian man'. His sentences often feel like the start of very long stories. His interests are so diverse. Is he bad at anything? There's a long silence. 'Probably. I don't know. I mean, I'm quite a practical person. I'm quite good with my hands. I work quite hard.' He has a think. 'I'm less good at nurturing my relationships. I'm quite work-focused. I think my girlfriend would agree with that.' For someone who doesn't go in for shopping, Grant has made a couple of whopping impulse purchases. He bought the ailing Cookson & Clegg because 'I'd worked with these people [when he owned Norton & Sons], and I didn't want to see them chucked on the scrapheap.' He had never considered a career in the fashion industry back when he saw the ad for Norton & Sons in the FT. His first degree was in engineering, and he'd considered retraining as an architect, and a landscape gardener, before doing an MBA at Oxford in his early 30s. (He must have been the only student to have an allotment.) So, is he impulsive? 'I'm decisive,' he says carefully. 'I'm definitely decisive. I don't know. Where's the boundary? I tend to decide quickly. And I tend not to worry about decisions too much once I've made them. What really was there to lose?' Well, money. 'It's not a huge motivator for me,' he says. 'I could have worked for a hedge fund or a private equity company or a management consultant and earned a lot of money.' But it is much easier to advocate for less from a position of plenty. Grant and his sister both attended private schools. He owned a house in Liverpool and another in Oxford, which he leveraged to buy Norton & Sons. His book describes a comfortable childhood and isn't always alert to the sound of privilege. 'We obviously had enough to pay [school] fees, but we also forewent everything else,' he says. 'We didn't have foreign holidays or much new stuff. I am conscious that I've always been privileged.' Clearly, though, he doesn't shop with the same financial imperative as lots of people do. He is a wealthy man. 'Yes, I probably am. No, I am,' he says, then adds, 'I have no liquid wealth.' His businesses were reported in 2018 to be valued at £75m; the line that Norton & Co made for Debenhams was 'turning over nearly £30m a year'. But when Debenhams went bust, 'it went to nowt overnight. They owed us a lot of money.' What was left 'went into here [Cookson & Clegg]. I didn't take anything from that. I own just over 50% and I own two-thirds of Community Clothing. And I own a house that is slowly being rebuilt. 'We have to try to find a way to reverse the enormous wealth inequality we've created. I'm trying to deploy whatsoever of my means I can, to do something that feels purposeful,' he says. 'There could be a simple and more comfortable life. But I'm proud of what I do.' Less: Stop Buying So Much Rubbish: How Having Fewer, Better Things Can Make Us Happier by Patrick Grant (William Collins, £10.99) is out in paperback on 22 May. To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
Telegraph
26-04-2025
- Business
- Telegraph
In search of the perfect shirt, jumper or dress? These British brands are best in class
Say the word ' fashion ' to most people, and their minds immediately turn to trends. Whether they follow them, or are baffled by them, but mostly, it's the assumption that fashion begins and ends there. There is another side to the industry that doesn't play into that cycle of short-lived thrills. It's one driven by craft, utility and expertise, and it's populated by people devoted to perfecting their product of choice. These are the specialists: makers that focus on one category, and deliver on it really well. Their products are both perfectly designed and practical. They're a breath of fresh air in an age of cheaper-than-cheap ultra-fast fashion, and high-end brands challenging the upper limit of what customers are prepared to pay. There's an earnestness about their pursuits, and honesty in their transparent supply chain and modest margins. 'Take a brand like If Only If Nightwear,' says Ginnie Chadwyck-Healey, founder of The FairGround, a sustainable fashion marketplace. 'It's a nightwear brand only doing nighties. No pyjamas [except for children's]. Not even very many dressing gowns. They do what they do brilliantly, and they have as low as 10 per cent returns.' These companies have no choice but to be good at what they do, says Patrick Grant, host of the Great British Sewing Bee and author of Less: Stop Buying So Much Rubbish: How Having Fewer, Better Things Can Make Us Happier. 'If you have a particular knowledge around designing something, and you only sell it in [one] category, if you don't do a good job of it, you're not going to be around for very long.' Many of us aspire to shift away from fast fashion, reduce the churn of clothes in our wardrobes, and assemble a timeless capsule of forever pieces, but designer prices and lack of confidence in where to invest makes this challenging to realise. These brands occupy a middle ground between the high street and luxury. Yes, you need to think twice before you purchase, but there is something immensely satisfying about not only owning something obsessively designed, crafted with care and made to last, but also fairly priced for the materials and manufacturing involved. Perhaps that's how we should approach every new wardrobe addition. Consider this your guide of British fashion's best in class. Skip to: The women's shirtmaker The knitwear designer The luxury bag brand The dressmakers The modern cobbler The demi-fine jewellers The women's shirtmaker Pip Durell, founder of women's shirting label With Nothing Underneath, had her lightbulb moment while working as a junior stylist at British Vogue. 'We were shooting a lot of shirts because they're such a [useful] layering and styling piece, but the one thing everyone kept saying was that there's not that much good [women's] shirting on offer. Everyone does a shirt, but no one really focuses on a shirt.' Durell favoured men's shirts at the time, and was regularly fielding compliments on them. 'I thought it's interesting that everyone clearly likes an oversized fit. And then I thought, it's also interesting that there are companies which make shirts for men, and there are no specific companies that make them for women. How many women in this country wear a shirt? I imagine most of them at some point.' The Boyfriend khaki stripe in linen/cotton, £110 She founded With Nothing Underneath with a single cotton poplin style, The Boyfriend, in 2017, and the range has grown to include a number of different silhouettes and fabrics, among them a slouchy weekend style and a bib-front dress shirt. Durell's also added trousers and a herringbone blazer to her repertoire, but shirts are still the main event. The Oversized Celeste blue in cotton, £110 'Women are shopping [with] us in the same way men do their shopping, it's repeat purchases. They come to us and they know their shape – people tend not to deviate between the shapes.' Getting the price point right has been key to her success. The cotton poplin and seersucker styles start at £95; linen and brushed cotton cost £120. 'Our margins are not that big. We're making shirts in the same place with the same material as a lot of [other brands which] are charging three times the price. What people love is that they really do feel that it's a quality piece worth investing in, and then the price point isn't too hard to swallow either.' The Weekend mustard multi-stripe in cotton/linen, £110 Also try: Emma Willis is the British answer to French heritage house Charvet. Her keep-forever shirts are made according to traditional techniques in Gloucester. She's also founder of Style for Soldiers, a charity that supports severely injured servicemen and women in the Armed Forces. The knitwear designer 'I've always loved jumpers,' says Rachel Carvell-Spedding, founder of knitwear label Navygrey. 'I grew up on the northwest coast. It's cold. We weren't allowed to put the heating on unless we had a proper wool jumper on. So I'm very much a jumper person, a jumper obsessive.' It was a particular 25-year-old jumper of her mother's that inspired her to launch the Navygrey brand in 2019. 'It's this really great wool jumper, made in the UK, that I borrowed. It's navy, it goes with everything, it just has a really great feeling. I turned to it again and again and again, but I couldn't find one in the shops that was like this.' Lambswool The Easy in Nordic blue, £295 Carvell-Spedding, who had been working in education, embarked on a mission to recreate it in her spare time, doing deep-dives into wool, technique and design in her bid to create the same result was The Relaxed, Navygrey's launch product and still its bestseller. 'We've tweaked it just a little bit over the past five years. You learn and you tweak the yarn, and you do things, little techniques, if you get customer feedback, but fundamentally, the silhouette, the shape, the colour, it remains.' She attributes the sense of nostalgia imbued in her knits to the fact that they have the same kind of fit and feel as the jumpers worn by our parents and grandparents – made in the UK with quality wool – a standard that's hard to find on the high street today. 'It's quality and fibre coming together,' she says. Lambswool The Easy in oatmeal, £295 Carvell-Spedding has achieved this with carefully sourced yarns, some spun using exclusively British wool, made by knitters largely based in the UK, as well as a small factory in Portugal. That, and a relentless pursuit of perfection without the restrictions of budget. 'We're always trying to think, how do we get more wool into a garment so you have a shape? The tighter you knit, the more wool you need, so it becomes more expensive to make as you're using more raw material, but it gives a compactness to the knit, which makes it warmer, and gives it structure as well.' With prices from £215, it's not a cheap jumper, but it's also significantly less than a designer brand might charge. And if it's the last navy jumper you'll ever buy? A bargain. Lambswool The Relaxed in navy, £295 Also try: Herd, for more nostalgic knits made with British wool in a beautiful palette. For cashmere, Aethel marries Loro Piana yarn with a former Celine designer's skill. The luxury bag brand Stow London founder Carol Lovell has Instagram personality Tanner Leatherstein to thank for the hype surrounding her bags. With over 750,000 followers, @ is a leather craftsman who deconstructs luxury bags to establish whether the price tag is justified. He described the £390 Curve design as 'the very best value bag I have reviewed' using leather from a tannery that 'blew my mind' which also supplies the highest-end labels. Stow was born as a travel accessories brand in 2013 and enjoyed early success, but Brexit and the pandemic made for challenging conditions. It was Lovell's manufacturer in Ubrique, Spain (the epicentre of luxury leather goods), who mooted a shift to handbags about three years ago. They now co-own the business and the manufacturing operation, which enables numerous efficiencies: waste is kept to a minimum as bags are sold on a pre-order basis, and shipped directly from Spain; a leaner, greener model. The brand relaunched in October with the Curve as the hero style. Post shoulder bag in pale green pebbled leather, £265 'I'm absolutely gobsmacked by the response to the collection,' Lovell says. 'The black Curve bag, we cannot keep up with the orders. Obviously we're limited by the fact that we have the one factory, but we're also ensuring that we're not over-producing… [And we've found that] people are happy to wait six weeks for their order.' The reasonable prices play a part too. It's why Lovell refuses to discount. Instead, she's chosen to keep margins slim. Even so, she admits, 'I was nervous not offering 10 per cent off a first order – but judging by the sales, it is not putting people off.' Curve bag in chocolate suede, £390 And then there's the design of the bags themselves, not chasing trends, not 'paying homage' to current It bags, just beautiful in their own right. 'It is a very unique shape,' Lovell says of the Curve. 'It is something a little bit different to what else is out there. We felt it was timeless… We're doing what we know how to do best.' Also try: Edinburgh-based Strathberry, whose Nano Tote and Mosaic Nano bags also received a rave review from Leatherstein. The designs have been seen on the arms of the Princess of Wales, the Duchess of Sussex and Katie Holmes. The dressmakers One of the brands that you'll encounter most over the social season is Rixo. 'April, May and June are our biggest months of the year, by far,' says Henrietta Rix, who co-founded the label with her university friend Orlagh McCloskey from their living room a decade ago. 'The peak is wedding season. We are seen as more of a summer brand, so as soon as the sun comes out, people go into our stores and try two or three dresses on.' It helps that Rixo, still independent with no outside investment, has a clear aesthetic: both Rix and McCloskey share a love of vintage, bias-cut dresses, and playful, clashing prints, many of which are designed in-house. The offering also includes blouses, jackets and bags, but dresses remain the backbone of the business. Evie silk crepe de chine midi dress, £345 McCloskey, Rixo's creative director, is obsessive about design: with any given dress, she can tell you how she's made it possible to wear with a bra, or how a ruffle flatters an exposed upper arm, or how the fit elongates the body. They offer petite and extended sizing too. No wonder, then, that they have huge waiting lists and celebrity fans including Margot Robbie, Holly Willoughby, Kylie Minogue and Taylor Swift. The hazard with anything popular, of course, is that other people will buy it too, so look for Rixo's exclusives. 'Some of those might be a trial buy,' Rix explains. 'They're just 50 units, so really limited edition, where we're like, 'We've done all the work, we think it's beautiful, but [wholesale] merchandisers might think it's a bit scary.'' Regine cotton maxi dress, £325 Rixo's appeal is not universal, Rix admits, but it's still broad. '[Our woman is] someone who has that feminine, bohemian spirit about them,' she says. 'She just wants to feel really good about herself.' That, in a dress, is a pretty powerful asset. Also try: St Clair for romantic floral dresses in the softest cotton; Mondo Corsini – a favourite on Chadwyck-Healey's The FairGround for its easy, pared-back linen dresses in just-interesting-enough silhouettes. The modern cobbler Jane Frances' minimalist designs and ultra-soft leathers have won her a loyal following, since founding her London-based label Dear Frances in 2016. Born and raised in Sydney, she studied footwear design in Italy and her dedication to the craft was honed by a year-long stint at a Milan shoe factory. It was an atypical move, as most graduates would have gone to work at a brand, she acknowledges. 'But that was where I really had my training ground.' It's also where the vision for her brand came to life. 'There was a gap in the market, that blending of those two worlds of tradition and modernity – bringing a modern eye and a distinct point of view, but always remaining true to the traditional techniques and the craftsmanship of Italian shoemaking.' Drew tasselled leather loafers in cognac, £490 This vision has been realised in a string of hit designs. Sleek, round-toed ballerinas, softly squared tasselled loafers, knotted leather slides. Everything is road-tested by her personally. 'I'm the 'fit foot', so I'm road testing them all the time, any time we have a new style, or even if it's just a new fabrication on a silhouette.' Not that she suffers from blisters – the leather is so soft it's not an issue. The much imitated Balla Mesh ballerina style is the label's best known design. 'I really love this idea of being able to see the shape and the movement of the foot through shoes.' This spring Frances has added a heeled version and a boot to the mesh line-up. Felice shoes in black mesh and leather, £460 Dear Frances shoes are not cheap, starting at £350, but its customer has exacting taste and is prepared to pay for a product that ticks every box. 'She is a mature woman who's very independent, very confident,' Frances says. 'She values comfort and style in equal measure, one is not more important than the other – not an easy balance to get right in shoes. So that's what we're always aiming to do.' Also try: Penelope Chilvers, for sturdy riding boots and espadrilles; Grenson for British-made lug-sole loafers and fisherman sandals; Camilla Elphick for her signature Lover flats and elegant mid-heel slingbacks. The demi-fine jewellers When sisters Christie and Rosanna Wollenberg opened their store in London's Holland Park last year, it felt like a kind of homecoming, being just ten minutes' walk from the flat where they founded their brand, Otiumberg, eight years prior. Name pendant in 9-carat gold, from £300 Back then, the term 'demi-fine' – to describe gold-plated jewellery, known as gold vermeil – wasn't as familiar as it is now. 'We just wanted to find pieces that felt refined, high quality, that weren't Freedom at Topshop or inaccessible [fine] jewellery,' Rosanna recalls. Tiny diamond initial tag pendant in 9-carat gold, from £280 It started organically, with a pair of oval huggies that Christie had made in the Middle East while working there for Louis Vuitton – her background is in luxury fashion, while Rosanna worked in arts and branding. 'Our friends were like, 'Where did these come from?' We just built it from there,' Rosanna says. 'We were doing it alongside our jobs for a fair few years to make sure that it actually resonated. I think we've always been the customer, so it felt very intuitive.' Roscida drop hoops in sterling silver, £125 The number of brands doing the kind of wear-all-the-time jewellery for which Otiumberg has become known has mushroomed in the intervening years, with quality varying wildly. They've still maintained a point of difference, both in the elegance of their designs and their high standards – only working with 14-carat gold vermeil on sterling silver, solid sterling silver and solid 14-carat gold. 'We wanted to stand the test of time from an aesthetic standpoint, so it's very modern and sculptural and timeless,' Christie says. Chaos ear cuff in 14-carat gold vermeil, £130 A little celebrity support has helped too: Anne Hathaway has ordered pieces online; Keira Knightley and Julianne Moore have worn it, as has Emma Watson, who was photographed wearing it on the cover of British Vogue. This spring, they launched their very first campaign star, the model Laura Bailey, who lives locally to the store. 'She came in, then she sweetly emailed us the next day, and said, I'd love to work with you,' Christie recalls. Wave cuff in sterling silver, £80 They're also able to engage with the customers in a more direct way. 'Jewellery is such an emotional thing,' says Rosanna. 'It's very good vibes in the store, they're looking for a 40th birthday present, they're treating themselves – it's always something to remember… The joy that people get when receiving or buying jewellery is wonderful to see.' Roscida heart hoops in 14-carat gold vermeil, £160 Also try: Tilly Sveaas, for her signature T-bar necklaces; Alighieri, for Hatton Garden-made pieces inspired by Dante Alighieri; By Pariah for Michelle Obama-approved stacking rings carved from natural gemstones.
