Sometimes you wonder if there’s a kitchen in Britain that doesn’t contain an Emma Bridgewater polka-dot mug or Cath Kidston rose-print ironing board cover. What’s more, from Manchester to Moscow and Didsbury to Dongying, homes are now being prettified with British blooms, pastel spots and bold daisy prints. OK, so Orla Kiely does Fifties retro with more of an art school intellectual/mid-century modern Scandinavian bent than Cath’s unashamedly British country-house nostalgia. And Emma is more about spongeware, whereas Clarissa’s work originates in photography. But the point is that all have created, or are in the process of creating, monster global brands based upon nothing more than pretty patterns. How so?
To find out, one has to go back to Laura Ashley. Her great breakthrough was discovering that good patterns did not have to be new. She was, as her husband and business partner Bernard pointed out, ‘not a designer, but a critic’. And Laura could spot winners. Many of their bestselling designs were rescaled and recoloured from endpapers in Victorian books. One even came from the rim of a 19th-century soup tureen, while she lifted dozens of ideas from Owen Jones’ famous book The Grammar of Ornament (1856). ‘In my opinion,’ she was quoted as saying, ‘a work of art goes on a wall – not on a woman! It’s suicide to design for yourself; we design only for the customer.’
Today, the head designer of Laura Ashley Home, Gillian Farr, who has been with the company six years, still refers back to those early archives for ideas. One of their most recent bestsellers, Gosford Tulip, was redrawn and recoloured from the original 19th-century document collected by Laura. ‘It is that nod to the English country-house look that people want,’ she says. (And are happy to buy into, despite the fact that the company is now under Malaysian management.)
Bringing new life to an old pattern is very much how Cath Kidston started out and today, thanks to updating Victorian buds, blooms and bouquets, she has taken herself from a handful of yummy mummies visiting one shop in Notting Hill to worldwide domination and a turnover of £50.4 million.
But while Kidston’s products look British, Emma Bridgewater’s are all made in Britain. Like the Ashleys, she and her business partner and husband Matthew Rice, the artist, want to revive a lost industry. Everything is handmade in a Victorian pottery in Stoke-on-Trent, the heart of the Staffordshire Potteries, by local people, many of whose skills would have been lost otherwise. And although she sees herself as a businesswoman rather than a designer, it is the patterns (and their subliminal promise of comfortable nostalgia) that sell. Recessions, she says, are good for her. ‘People may not be able to buy houses or new kitchens, but they can cheer themselves up with a new teapot and set of mugs.’
Both Orla Kiely and Clarissa Hulse come from design backgrounds, but that hasn’t stopped their brands growing at breakneck speed. Indeed, Kiely received her OBE from the Business Secretary Vince Cable last July, two months before opening her first US store. For her, pattern is everything. ‘It is not a trend for me, to be taken up one minute and abandoned the next. Pattern is in me. It is my life.’ Which probably explains why it sells so well.
Clarissa Hulse, whose duvets and cushions are currently going great guns in House of Fraser, puts her success down to the range’s broad appeal. ‘It fits in to so many settings: country cottage, Georgian town house, Shoreditch modern.’
Orla Kiely
Famous for: Classic Fifties retro designs – almost singlehandedly returning British homes to their Formica heyday.
Signature piece: That ubiquitous Stem print.
Inspiration: Mid-century modern design classics, especially Scandinavian; rainy-afternoon matinée films; Fernand Léger and late Matisse collages.
Vintage: Growing up in Ireland in a Fifties-style house left a lasting love of pattern and colour. ‘My taste for colour,’ she says, ‘has been influenced by my childhood. My love of green, from moss to seaweed, the greys and browns of the huge skies and rolling landscapes, the wildflowers on the roadside verges.’After various jobs in fashion and textiles, Orla and her husband Dermott Rowan set up their own label. An initial foray into hats was abandoned for bags (after her father noticed that not everyone at Fashion Week wore a hat, but all carried bags).
Her first breakthrough came in 1997 with an order from Debenhams. The second was the creation of Stem in 2001. ‘While Stem was cute,’ she writes in her book Pattern, ‘it was not too pretty.’ It first appeared on summery bags but soon grew into the Orla Kiely brand that has taken over the world, with stockists from Denmark to Japan.
Did you know? Every collection since 2001 has featured Stem in some form.
For stockists, call 020 7720 1117 or buy online at www.orlakiely.com
Emma Bridgewater
Famous for: Traditional English spongeware with hand-finished charm.
Signature piece: Polka-dot mug, of which 600 leave the factory in Stoke-on-Trent every week. Each mug goes through 54 different hand-applied processes before it’s finally ready.
Inspiration: Her mother’s Oxfordshire kitchen with scrubbed pine table and Welsh dresser.
Vintage: Like many of the best entrepreneurs – and an entrepreneur is how she describes herself, rather than a designer – Emma Bridgewater started out in 1985 with a single idea. ‘I wanted to buy my mother a mug for her birthday, something to add to her kitchen-dresser collection, but there was nothing that was right. It was one of those “Kerching!” moments,’ she says.
With no knowledge of pottery and precious little of business – other than working for a friend’s knitwear company – she set about designing a mug, a bowl, a jug and a dish, and headed to Stoke-on-Trent, the home of the potteries since Josiah Wedgwood’s day, to have it made from the local cream earthenware and decorated using a forgotten spongeware technique.
Today Emma Bridgewater is the sixth-largest employer of potters in Staffordshire with over 200 employees and each year more than 20,000 visitors come to her factory for tours, courses and to visit the café and shop. Her main ambition now? To expand the business while protecting handmade craftsmanship and British manufacturing skills and jobs.
Did you know? Every piece of spongeware is initialled by the decorator and backstamped ‘Emma Bridgewater’. The stamp changes every year.
To order, call 0844 243 9266 or buy online at www.emmabridgewater.co.uk
Clarissa Hulse
Famous for: Wildflower silhouettes printed on coloured silk, redolent of lost meadows.
Signature piece: Hand-screen-printed silk cushion in Burnet or Cow Parsley.
Inspiration: Wildflowers, shrubs and trees from London pavements to the snow-capped Cairngorms.
Vintage: The genesis of the business was the discovery, while studying textiles at Brighton College of Art, of an old book of dried flowers. Soon she was sourcing her own flowers and printing them on silk scarves. A talent scout from the Takashimaya store in New York snapped them up in 1994. Massive orders followed from Liberty in London and Nieman Marcus and Saks in New York. It was all very fast. ‘I worked day and night and employed someone to help at the print table.’
She found her niche in home furnishings, making her name with silk cushions, then expanding into throws and lampshades. By 2005 she was selling in Heal’s, Harrods, the Conran Shop and had launched her popular range for House of Fraser. Today her designs appear on everything from scarves to iPod covers and she has more than 100 outlets worldwide.
Did you know? Clarissa always carries a sheet of white background paper ready to photograph wildflower finds.
For stockists, call 020 7226 7055 or buy online at www.clarissahulse.com
Cath Kidston
Famous for: English country-house florals with a distinct hint of vintage, pastel polka dots and those cute Fifties cowboys whirling lassos across everything from oilcloth tablecloths to tents.
Signature piece: Take your pick – but let’s say Spray Flowers in its latest reworking as an iPhone 4 case.
Inspiration: Childhood memories of fabric and wallpaper patterns at home.
Vintage: Armed with just £15,000 Cath Kidston opened her first shop in 1993 selling vintage fabrics and tatty old kitchen chairs she dug out of country auctions and slathered with primary-coloured gloss paint. Today she has 41 shops and concessions in the UK, two in Ireland, 15 in Japan and four in Korea. Ironing-board covers led the way into a cosy but quirky world of flowery mugs and cute peg bags, and today Kidston is as ubiquitous as Laura Ashley was in the Seventies. Her products are designed by a British-based team and are made all over the world.
Did you know? Cath is the cousin of TV style guru Kirstie Allsopp. One range of new paint colours was based on colourful supermarket egg cartons.
To order, call 0845 026 2440 or buy online at www.cathkidston.co.uk
This article originally appeared in the February 2012 issue of Saga Magazine
Photographs by Dan Duchars, styling by Marie Nichols