The fashion queen who earned her stripes on market stall
About to expand in the US, Clare Hornby is...
YOU might not have heard of Clare Hornby, but you will almost certainly know her style. Celebrities including Cara Delevingne have been photographed wearing ME+EM, the fashion brand she founded. The Princess of Wales and her mother Carole Middleton have been pictured in the same sugar pink silk maxi dress. Its swing tops and signature side-stripe trousers are seen on countless women of a certain age who don’t want to fade into frump.
Hornby’s influence has filtered down with versions of her garments all over the high street. So are we reaching peak side-stripe trouser?
‘Well, Marks and Spencer have got them now… you can get too much of something.
‘The science of the stripe is genius, it has an elongation and slimming effect. It is part of our DNA, we are just making it more subtle. I love it. We are paring it down now, but in two years’ time, it will be back.’
To the uninitiated, this might sound like fashion froth, but there is serious money in those side-stripes. Now aged 53, Hornby started the business in 2009, and earlier this year, a £55million fundraising from investors led by venture capital firm Highland Europe, valued the brand at £130 million.
Highland joins existing investors Sir Charles Dunstone, who co-founded Carphone Warehouse, and Venrex Investment Management. Former M&S executive Maurice Helfgott has been drafted in as chairman.
The new money is primarily to expand in the US, currently around 20 per cent of sales. ‘Hopefully, we will open our first US store in spring next year and there is a plan to open 15.’
Hornby says she still has a ‘very big’ stake despite welcoming new backers. A stock market float, she adds, ‘is not on the radar’.
‘We didn’t have any debt in the business. We were cash generative. This is all about expansion.’
It has 180 employees and the latest accounts, to January this year, show revenues up 114 per cent to £47.7 million, despite the pandemic, and more than 152 per cent overseas. Pre-tax profit came in at just under £9.7 million.
THE cost-of-living crisis has not yet filtered down to her customers, perhaps because they are better off than average. ‘You would expect a huge amount of people to be worried about mortgage rates, but we haven’t seen any decline in sales.’
We meet in a former brewery in London’s Notting Hill, which is also home to Cefinn, the fashion business of Samantha Cameron, wife of the former Prime Minister.
The walls are decorated with photographs of residents of ‘The Free and Independent Republic of Frestonia’, which was a squatters’ community that grew up in the 1970s on nearby Freston Road, then a near-slum.
One is of a lady called Nancy, who, the caption says, threw bricks, chased people with a breadknife and had ‘the most awful life’ in a house with no electricity or toilet, eating what she could scavenge. Who knows what Nancy would have made of the fact Frestonia is now occupied by fashionistas. But the world moves on, and ME+EM is about to move to White City in West London for more space.
The quintessential customer Hornby has in mind is, she says, ‘socially busy, works and is juggling a family. The philosophy is, that we make dressing easier. We do a lot of the work for you, around proportion and shape, so you can get on with the important things in life.
‘My whole strategy is around price and quality. We sit between luxury and high street,’ she adds. The concept is one of ‘building blocks’, where a navy jacket, for instance, can run across seasons, can be teamed with different garments and create new looks.
‘Our navy is standardised across every supplier so you can build your navy wardrobe. It’s much harder than you might think to do that, when you might have one supplier in Italy and another in China.’
Hornby is one part of a power couple with her husband Johnny, who founded advertising agency The & Partnership and is a director of ME+EM. He is also the chairman of Prince Harry’s Sentebale charity and a cofounder of lager and cider brand Hawkstone with Jeremy Clarkson. Family gatherings might be quite something. Johnny’s half-brother is author Nick Hornby, and his brother-in-law is another famous novelist, Robert Harris, who in turn is married to Gill Hornby, a third renowned writer. Clare was brought up in Saddleworth, near Manchester; her mother was a teacher and her father ran a building company.
She discovered her love of fashion aged 15, when she had a stall on Oldham market selling second-hand Italian shoes.
After a degree at Manchester Metropolitan University, she took a job at Harrods as a marketing trainee, and from there moved into advertising.
‘My love of luxury happened at Harrods,’ she says. ‘You could shop on staff discounts, and I missed it when I left. Advertising taught me about the strategic positioning of brands, mapping the market.’
Hornby used those skills ‘to make this business different’. She says it combines a ‘love of clothes, love of luxury and an insight into the gap in the market’ and ‘the growth of online shopping’.
Adding family life to the formula, she says, was tough.
‘I am a stepmother and a mum and it was really hard, even though I was very lucky because my husband had run his own business and made a success of it. So I had help at home and my mum is a complete rock star. I wasn’t a superwoman,’ she says. ‘You can do kids well, family well and work well but something has to give. I missed out on all the socialising around school. I haven’t had lunch out with friends since starting the business.’
ME+EM is not cheap, with some blazers selling for £350 and evening trousers at £225. But Hornby insists it is good value. ‘We give easy tricks to reinvent wardrobes and we constantly think about ways of delivering better costper-wear. Every piece we do has versatility built in to it.’ The price points, she says, are around 20 per cent more than the upper end of the high street and ‘a lot more’ than fast fashion. ‘We have a shearling coat for £1,500, but you can’t get that quality on the high street and luxury designers would be an awful lot more.’
In the UK, most sales are online. There are six standalone shops and three concessions, one in Manchester and two in London. Hornby has just been scouting out Edinburgh as a possible store location.
‘I think of stores as profitable marketing centres. It is very good to go in to try it and feel a garment and get the right size.’
A customer who buys in store and online is, she says, three times more valuable than one who shops through a single channel only.
Mother-and-daughter garment sharing – Kate and Carole Middleton-style – is common among customers, she says.
‘We have clothes I would wear, my mum would wear and my 18-yearold daughter would wear – completely differently of course. My philosophy is you should look modern and contemporary. Even though I am 53!
‘There is that wonderful balancing act of not wanting to look muttony but looking fashionable.’
‘We have clothes my mum and I would wear’