Luxury Brand
Founder Stories | Bec Astley Clarke on Building a Luxury Brand Online.
In the latest instalment of Founder Stories, a series highlighting the personal and professional journeys of some of fashion’s most dynamic entrepreneurs, BoF speaks with Bec Astley Clarke, founder of luxury jeweller Astley Clarke.
BoF sat down with Bec Astley Clarke only days after she was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) by Queen Elizabeth II for doing what was once considered impossible — building a fully fledged luxury brand on the Internet — and doing it with a distinctly British combination of elegance and irreverence.
Over the last seven years, the eponymous founder of Astley Clarke has turned what began as a multi-brand e-tailer, selling jewellery by other designers, into a small but rapidly expanding modern British luxury brand, designing and distributing its own fine and contemporary jewellery collections (which now account for about 70 percent of the overall business) both online and off. The company declined to disclose exact turnover, saying annual revenue was still under £10 million (about $15 million) but that trading was up over 45 percent on last year, with sales of “core” own-label Astley Clarke collections growing at over 200 percent, year on year.
In recent months, the company has also hired a professional managing director, Scott Thomson, and is “full steam ahead” with plans to expand the business offline and internationally, in the US, Europe and China.
BoF spoke to Bec Astley Clarke, a rare fashion-tech founder whose background spans both fashion and technology, to discuss the genesis of Astley Clarke, building a luxury brand online, growing a multi-channel business, bringing in a professional chief executive and the ‘just do it’ attitude she inherited from her Everest-climbing father.