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Influence: Clare Hornby’s fashion company ME+EM is valued at £130 million
You may not have heard of Clare Hornby, but you 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 are pictured in the same sugar pink silk maxi dress. The swing tops and signature side-striped pants are seen on countless women of a certain age who don’t want to fade into a bitch.
Hornby’s influence has seeped through with high street versions of her garments. So do we get to side stripe peaked pants?
“Well, Marks and Spencer have them now… you can get too much of something.
‘The science of the stripe is genius, it has a stretching and slimming effect. It’s part of our DNA, we just make it more subtle. I love it. We are now phasing it out, but it will be back in two years’ time.’
To the uninitiated, this may sound like fashion foam, but there’s some serious money in those side stripes. Hornby, now aged 53, started the company in 2009, and earlier this year a £55 million fundraising led by venture capital firm Highland Europe valued the brand at £130 million.
Highland joins existing investors Sir Charles Dunstone, co-founder of Carphone Warehouse, and Venrex Investment Management. Former M&S director Maurice Helfgott has been called up as chairman.
The new money is mainly for expanding in the US, currently about 20 percent of sales. “Hopefully next spring we will open our first US store and there is a plan to open 15.”
Hornby says she still has a ‘very strong’ interest despite welcoming new backers. An IPO, she adds, “isn’t on the radar.”
“We had no debt in the company. We were cash generating. This is about expansion.’
It has 180 employees and its latest accounts, to January this year, show a 114 per cent increase in turnover to £47.7 million despite the pandemic, and more than 152 per cent abroad. Pre-tax profit came in at just under £9.7m.
The cost of living crisis has not yet reached its customers, perhaps because they are better off than average. ‘You would expect a lot of people to be worried about mortgage interest, but we don’t see a drop in turnover.’
We meet in a former brewery in London’s Notting Hill, which is also home to Cefinn, the fashion company 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’, a squatter community that grew up in the 1970s on nearby Freston Road, then a near-slum.
One is of a lady named Nancy, who, the caption says, threw stones, chased people with a bread knife and had “the most horrible life” in a house with no electricity or toilet, eating what she could catch. Who knows what Nancy would have made of the fact that Frestonia is now occupied by fashionistas. But the world moves on and ME+EM is about to move to West London’s White City for more space.
The typical customer Hornby has in mind is, she says, “social, working and juggling a family. The philosophy is that we make dressing easier. We do much of the work for you, around proportion and shape, so you can get on with the important things in life.
‘My whole strategy revolves around price and quality. We are between luxury and high street,” she adds. The concept is one of ‘building blocks’, where a navy blue jacket, for example, can go through the seasons, combine with different garments and create new looks.
‘Our navy is standardized for each supplier, so you can put together your navy wardrobe. It’s much more difficult than you might think to do if you have one supplier in Italy and another in China.’
Hornby is 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 charity Sentebale and co-founder of the lager and cider brand Hawkstone with Jeremy Clarkson.
Family gatherings can be quite a bit. 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 well-known writer. Clare grew up in Saddleworth, near Manchester; her mother was a teacher and her father owned a construction company.
She discovered her love of fashion when she was 15, when she owned a stall in Oldham Market selling second-hand Italian shoes.
After studying at Manchester Metropolitan University, she took a job at Harrods as a marketing intern and moved on to the advertising world from there.
“My love of luxury started at Harrods,” she says. ‘You could shop with an employee discount, which I missed when I left. Advertising taught me about strategically positioning brands, mapping out the market.’ Hornby used those skills “to make this company different.”
She says it combines “a love of clothes, a love of luxury and an understanding of the gap in the market” with “the growth of online shopping.” Adding family life to the formula, she says, was difficult.
“I am a stepmother and a mother and it was really hard, even though I was very lucky because my husband had his own business and made it a success. So I had help at home and my mom is a complete rock star. I wasn’t superwoman,” she says. ‘You are good with children, good with the family and good at work, but you have to give something. I missed all the fun around school. I haven’t had lunch with friends since the start of the business.’
Stylish: the mother of the Princess of Wales, Carole Middleton, in a ME+EM dress
ME+EM isn’t cheap, with some blazers selling for £350 and evening trousers for £225. But Hornby insists it’s good value. “We teach simple tricks to reinvent wardrobes and we are constantly thinking about ways to deliver better cost-per-wear. Every piece we make has versatility built in.”
The price points, she says, are about 20 percent higher than the high end of the high street and “much more” than fast fashion. “We have a sheepskin coat for £1,500 but you can’t get that quality on the high street and luxury designers would be a whole lot more.”
In the UK, most sales take place online. There are six independent stores and three concessions, one in Manchester and two in London. Hornby is just exploring Edinburgh as a possible retail location.
“I see stores as profitable marketing centers. It’s really good to go in and try it on and feel a piece of clothing and find the right size.’
According to her, a customer who buys in-store and online is three times more valuable than a customer who shops through a single channel.
Sharing clothes between mother and daughter — Kate and Carole Middleton style — is common among shoppers, she says.
“We have clothes that I would wear, my mother would wear and my 18-year-old daughter would wear – very different, of course. My philosophy is that you should look modern and contemporary. Even though I’m 53!
“There’s that wonderful balancing act of not wanting to look stuffy, but wanting to look fashionable.”
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