Off the back of steady growth, Halfpenny London is focusing on retail expansion, with growing business in the US (tariffs notwithstanding), Japan and the UAE. But as the business expands, Halfpenny is determined to maintain her ‘Made in the UK’ business, which poses challenges. As she straddles the past and the future, the designer sat down with Vogue Business to chart her path.
Vogue: You’re celebrating 20 years of Halfpenny, but let’s take it back to the beginning. How did you start out?
This interview is a full-circle moment, in a way. In 2005, I was styling Emilia Fox, and she was getting married to fellow actor Jared Harris. I ended up making two of her three dresses and I bumped into her aunt, Fiona Golfar, who used to work at Vogue, and she said, ‘Have you ever been to Vogue House? Come jump in the cab with me. I’ll take you for a look around.’ They were doing a feature on bridal and they asked me to make a veil for writer Charlotte Sinclair, and they wrote about it. And that was kind of the start of the brand. Emilia was just like, ‘You have got a website, right?’ And we built one. It was pre-social media, so the brand grew almost completely word of mouth.
Vogue: At which point did you say, ‘OK, I’m going to pack in the styling and focus on my business’?
My front room would become a bridal studio on a weekend, and my husband James would be trapped upstairs. He couldn’t get down because there’d be brides changing! Eventually, he said, ‘You can clearly see the demand. You’re working all weekend and you’ve got back-to-back appointments.’ So in 2013, I found a shop on Camden Council’s website. I was still styling, and so we opened the shop, which is still our flagship today on Woburn Walk. I was thinking back then, I only need to sell one dress a month to make this shop work, little did I know how much running a shop actually costs. I was so naive, I didn’t think about little things like needing a phone line or a burglar alarm, and most importantly someone to staff the store while I was still styling.
