I was still relatively fresh out of university when I visited Alice Temperley’s studio in Notting Hill to interview her for Portuguese Elle magazine. At the time, I was the UK contributor and suggested an article about her, after seeing her beautiful collection at London Fashion Week.
Alice Temperley in Somerset
With me was Michael Tomlinson, a beloved friend to this day and a fantastic photographer. We worked together up to 2007, when I dropped all magazine contributions to focus on my work at BBC. They finally hired me as a full-time permanent producer, after a three-year casual contract!
So much has happened since then, that it feels like a different lifetime, but I’ve always followed Alice Temperley’s business trajectory, including when the Queen presented her with an MBE for her services to fashion in 2011.
I was really happy to hear she was speaking at Source Fashion, a business to business event gathering sustainable manufacturers under one roof, aimed at fashion brands and retailers. It was held at Olympia London and organised by Hyve Group plc.
I’m afraid this may be slightly partial as I currently work there as the Content Editor for UK Retail, but it’s important to underline I don’t deliver digital content for this particular trade show.
Alice Temperley started her career journey 20 years ago, when studying textiles at Central Saint Martin’s. She ended up in fashion almost by accident, paying her way through her studies by transforming her fabrics into clothes to sell, to acquire more fabrics for her course, which was specialised in printing.
“If I had my life all over again, I probably would have gone straight into fine art print for interiors.”
This is an area she’s about to launch in her own business. The fashion industry is now completely different, from online sales to social media, and the whole focus on driving sustainability forward. The pandemic has also caused a necessary break to rethink the way fashion businesses operate.
Temperley London, Spring Summer 2019
“Who comes to a fashion show? Who needs to come to my show? What’s the relevance of the fashion show? Should you really be spending over £100,000 to show a collection six months before it’s going to be delivered?”
These are relevant questions that will influence the way fashion will evolve in the future. It no longer makes sense to do business as before when the industry is not the same. Temperley now produces only two collections per year.
She realised she didn’t need to abide by the rules of the high street and decided she wasn’t going to be crippled by the wholesale department store model. Instead, she went a step further to survive the pandemic and went direct to consumer, apart from her bridal and heritage lines, which are still available to buy wholesale.
The business is also attuned with the seasons, for instance summer dresses are now delivered closer to summer. During COVID, Temperley’s store in London was closed down as nobody was shopping and there were high business rates and staff costs.
The whole business model was restructured and moved to Somerset, where she can be close to her family and bought a huge space in comparison to her previous London office, for the equivalent amount of money as a year’s rent in London.
Celebrities wearing Temperley London
It’s a 22,000 square foot Victorian building housing Temperley’s design atelier, a training workshop, a store with both current collections and archive pieces, and a bar - The Somerset - serving cocktails and cider from her parents farm.
It opened many more opportunities for people who can’t or don’t want to live in London. It’s been a real pilot of operating a fashion business in a different way, in line with the current state of affairs.
Discounts are also a thing of the past, as costs to produce garments just keep going up, and there’s a timeless quality to her designs. Instead of diluting the brand, products are treasured and become part of her heritage line.
When Temperley moved to the countryside, she made a deliberate effort to find factories in the area, but she also produces in Italy, Portugal, India and China. She worked and lived in Hong Kong in 1999 and met some of her closest suppliers then, including her sole manufacturer of silver linings.
The printing quality is superior in Europe, while in India there are different sorts of embroideries, that have been passed down for generations. Global sourcing is just practical, as she needs to go to the right place for the right product. “Unfortunately you can’t seem to find everything in the same place.”
Temperley was vocal against Brexit, she had to get somebody to help with the logistics of shipping, manufacturing, and selling in Europe and the rest of the world. She had a warehouse in Italy that ended up being closed down, and another in England to cope with distribution demands.
Another key concern for any business is how people order more products to try them at home and then return whatever they don’t want, but someone needs to pay for the resultant costs, and the time in transit can be crucial for selling to someone else. That’s why her heritage line is now a rolling stock line. She also talked about sustainability:
“It’s about producing less and being really focused on what the brand should be producing. Just making what you’re good at and being really conscious of that.”
It was really encouraging to hear from her again and learn more about how agile a fashion brand needs to be to remain relevant throughout the years, particularly when the world at large is going though such a massive disruption on so many different levels.
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