Meet the woman who reinvented midlife dressing
She’s won loyal fans, including the Duchess of Cambridge. Now Me+Em’s Clare Hornby wants to crack America.
‘During the menopause, I’d just be going to sleep and then feel like I was dying. It was awful’
‘If I was ever mentally ill, it would be because something was wrong with the children, not the business’
What does the house of a woman who helms a clothing brand recently valued at £130million look like? Answer: just as you’d expect. Clare Hornby’s Notting Hill home is the quintessence of good taste: a fragrant bower of purple hydrangeas, Diptyque candles, antique rugs, four-figure sofas and the sort of art you might pick up at Frieze, though nothing as obvious as a Hirst or an Emin. A large bookcase lines one downstairs wall, a pile of novels stacked horizontally in the middle of each shelf. It’s deliciously exacting – as is Me+em. Founded in 2009, the label loved by Nicole Kidman, Sienna Miller, the Countess of Wessex and the Duchess of Cambridge has carved a special place in busy women’s lives by delivering the sort of wardrobe solutions they need, but don’t have time to hunt for.
Hornby calls it “the three Fs”: flattering, functional and forever. Appearing in front of me in a lemon blazer, striped blue shirt and wide-leg jeans, she’s the best advertisement for her company – a tall woman who looks much younger than her 52 years, though not in a “done” way. She’s just finished her first-ever live TV interview and is endearingly traumatised. “My legs turned to jelly. Suddenly, your face is on screen and it’s huge!”
We settle upstairs, Hornby with a black coffee and me with a water, which isn’t tap or even Evian, but Voss, artesian water from Norway that is one of the world’s purest. Five minutes into our conversation, it’s clear that Hornby is a details person, one blessed with that rare, alchemical skill set that combines a head for figures with a flair for creativity. Harness both, and it’s a licence to print money: £55million, to be exact, since that’s what she’s just raised from investors to expand into America next year.
“Nothing’s changed,” she says firmly. “Kids still throw you the same curveballs. Work still throws you the same curveballs. You’ve got a bigger responsibility, bigger investors, bigger numbers to hit, but nothing feels any different.”
This all sounds very sexy, I say. “I love stats,” she smiles. “You’ve got to love the numbers as much as the product, because the product changes the numbers. It has to inform everything, and once you’ve created the right product, you’ve got to communicate it in the right way. You’ve got to be current at all times, constantly thinking and being ahead of the customer. You can’t just use data, otherwise the data will only be backwards looking. You’ve also got to be intuitive, and see what’s being read in the tea leaves in the data, and look at what’s running out of steam and what’s suggesting a way forward. And it’s changing all the time at the moment, isn’t it?”
It certainly is, with the loungewear that surged during the pandemic now being replaced by demand for what Hornby calls “event dressing”. She says tastes change incrementally. “It’s in the ether. We don’t really know why suddenly a jacket shape or trouser feels dated. It’s a bit like your health. You never notice your health until you’re ill. We didn’t realise how much we missed our friends, laughing and dancing. Now we can have it again, we’re going to b----- well go for it, dress up and treat ourselves to everything we couldn’t.”
Who has the biggest impact on her sales? “The Duchess. There isn’t anyone like her. In terms of global appeal, nothing comes close. And quite rightly. She is amazing. So stoic, and therefore, we respect her.”
While Me+em first made a name with its drawstring trousers (Kirsty Wark was an early fan), Hornby is proud that dresses now account for 40 per cent of sales. Not bad for a selfconfessed “trouser geek”. As for a sweet spot in terms of price, “it’s always the gap” – by which she means the gap between high street prices and high end. That’s what Me+em fills so adroitly, sating the thirst for well-made products that the high street gets wrong and designers price far out of the average budget.
One might have expected a brand founded on smart loungewear to perform well during the lockdowns, but it exceeded expectations. “We were very lucky with the weather. We try to make clothes that you will wear a lot. We wouldn’t make a dress that you could only wear on holiday – it would be for hot days and holidays. And of course, we had a heatwave. We obviously didn’t anticipate that we were going to get everybody sitting on Zoom. So our pretty tops took off. There we all were, staring at ourselves, going ‘more tops!’ ”
“The only thing that really died was workwear. We couldn’t sell a blazer for love nor money, and now we can’t sell enough blazers. Blazers have just gone crazy.” So has yellow, which Hornby attributes to it being “the most optimistic colour when you’re coming out of a pandemic. Women just want to get going again.”
Upbeat and positive as she is, the pandemic shook her, as it did every business owner.
“I immediately went into shock,” she recalls. “Sales literally stopped because the world went into shock. Same with Ukraine when war first happened – there was a mini shock. For the first two weeks of the pandemic, you couldn’t get your head around it. And then you had to get your head around it,” she laughs.
The brand’s direct to consumer business model meant Hornby could respond nimbly to shifts in demand. “Because we work much more in the moment, a lot of our clothes weren’t made, so we were able to hold the fabric with the suppliers. We did so much so quickly, fuelled by adrenaline. I got very close to the communications [team]. We launched a blog. And then suddenly, two weeks in, sales were coming from nowhere. As human beings, we adapt very quickly. We got our families all under one roof. We did whatever we needed to. And then the sun came out. I think a lot of fashion businesses were saved by the sunshine.
“I became very decisive, and that’s helped me on the other side, because the decisions I made in large part were the right ones.”
She’s well aware that it wasn’t as simple for most.
“For the people who work for me and had young children, it was a very different ballgame. I was incredibly lucky, because I have two teenage daughters. They were amazing. [My husband] Johnny also has his own business, and I think it was really good for them to see how hard one has to work to provide nice things. Maddie, my 18-year-old, became the most phenomenal cook. She made all the meals, and Grace, 17, was sous chef.”
She also has three grown-up stepchildren with her husband, Johnny Hornby, who works in communications (the author Nick Hornby is her brother in law). “I have huge inspiration from Maddie, Grace and their friends,” she says.
They share clothes. “Fortunately, we’re all the same size. I almost use them as research projects, which is a terrible thing to say,” she says. “I’m really interested in this ‘buy once, share twice’ idea. It’s a multigenerational insight that means they can have nice things because of the fact that they won’t own them exclusively. You still have rows, obviously. But I can remind them that the only reason they have it is because they agreed to share it in the first place.”
She’s candid on the role that childcare backup played in her success, praising “my incredible mother, Pam” who provided guilt-free support in the early years. “She lives up north [Hornby was raised in Saddleworth, outside Oldham] but was always prepared to come down at the drop of a hat. I don’t think I could have done it without her. Johnny’s also very good at helping, so we juggled a lot.”
She’s equally candid about how women can’t have it all. “What I really have missed about doing this is friendships. I’ve never gone to a lunch. I’ve never gone to a coffee morning. I’ve never built that closeness at the school gates. That’s the sacrifice. You still have friends, but you’re not in the club. You’re outside, because you can’t do this and be a good mum and be the friend that’s always there. That’s the thing that’s sad. Now it’s fine – it was the early years that were hard. That’s when the girls [would say] ‘you’re not on the PTA, you’re not this, you’re not that’ – and you feel very guilty. Now they’re older, it matters less. I think they’re quite proud.”
On the menopause, she’s even more candid. “It’s good that it’s talked about, because it felt like a really mean thing that you had to go through. I had panic attacks. Just before I went into a deep sleep, I’d think I was dying and wake up. So that was pretty awful. And terrible headaches. I came off red wine, coffee, everything, and they just wouldn’t go. I went on HRT very early. It was quite extraordinary, the difference it made. I never looked back. But then I started to put on weight, so I went vegan for five years and that was a game-changer.” She also exercises. “Pilates every morning, and I play a lot of tennis. Oh, and I drink CBD tea. It knocks me out every night.”
She laughs when asked how she preserves her sanity. “The business can never wobble me. The children can. If I was ever going to become mentally ill, it would be because of something going wrong with the children, not the business. I think maybe some northernness in me is the only thing that saves me. And age, to be honest. There’s something about age that just lets you weather storms. You’ve been there, you’ve done it.” She
certainly has.