Profile Peter Howarth
Tuesday, June 12, 2018 –
12:02pm
When Jade Holland Cooper was seven years old, she started her
first business. “It was selling eggs,” she remembers. “I had 30
hens, and the other day I found my old notebook where I was listing
variable costs and profit – I’ve always been quite commercially
minded.”
Today, the 31 year old has swapped eggs for clothes. But one
suspects that there is still a notebook somewhere in which she
scrutinises the accounts. Indeed, she reveals the best piece of
advice she was given when she said she wanted to start a fashion
company was from her father: “He said I had to make sure I combined
creativity with knowing the numbers; so I learnt about the
financials and now run the business strictly according to regular
management accounts.”
Holland Cooper’s father is a farmer and her mother worked as a
couturier in London and Paris. It is perhaps unsurprising that,
with these dual influences, as a teenager she was torn between
pursuing a place at fashion college and one at agricultural
college. The Royal Agricultural College in Cirencester won out, but
it didn’t take long for her to rethink.
“I was going to all these social events in the country,” Holland
Cooper explains. “I’m a country girl at heart – I grew up on an
arable farm in Suffolk, after all. So, I’d travel around to the
polo and horse trials, and everywhere I went I noticed there was a
lack of stylish, fashionable clothing for women to wear at these
sorts of places: clothes that had the flair of urban pieces, but
with a countryside influence.” She decided there was a gap she
could fill and determined to have a go; she reasoned that if she
ended up wanting to learn farming, she could do that at home with
her father without the college time. She was 21.
“I was really young, I suppose, but I had this idea and I was
convinced I could make it work,” she explains. “And I am tenacious
– like a dog with a bone once I make up my mind to do something.
The hardest thing was persuading people to take me seriously and
then having to hire and manage people who were often twice my age.
But I soon showed that I knew what I was talking about and things
quickly took off.”
The principle behind the business is simple, she says. The
town/country fashion divide is being broken down by widely
available imagery on social media and online and the fact that now
many people have places in both. “In Cheltenham, where I’m based
now, this is so apparent,” she explains. “We have great arts
festivals and horseracing here, and there are good restaurants and
shops. Many people live between here and London now, and they want
sophisticated, elegant and stylish clothes that can work in both
settings.”
A look at the website (through which the label does 60% of its
sales) shows how this philosophy has developed a modern take on
classic country-influenced clothing for men and women.
Scottish-tweed jackets stylishly cut to give a fashionable fit,
waxed cotton capes that are as well suited to festivals as to the
polo, skirts in houndstooth and brown Prince of Wales check that
can do boardroom as well as outdoors, stylish short coats in camel
and country check that are equally at home in the Cotswolds and
Chelsea, as well as a wide range of accessories, including on-trend
tweed baker boy caps.
Holland Cooper’s hunch about the desire for this hybrid look was
correct. In ten years, the firm has gone from being a 21-year-old’s
dream to a £10 million business, with two stores in the UK (and
five new ones in development) and many others stocking its wares
around the country and abroad, including Harrods, where it is the
best-performing label on the 5th floor. Along the way, the founder
has managed to build a successful relationship with a network of
factories in the UK, and has championed British wool and tweed.
This year alone she bought 800,000 metres of British tweed. The
homegrown element of the business is something she is very proud
of, as is the in-house apprentice scheme she has started for young
people to get them into the fashion industry.
What advice, then, would this young entrepreneur give to others
thinking about striking out on their own? “Do not be swayed from
your vision,” she says emphatically. “If you believe in yourself,
be clear, understand your journey, your customer, and make sure the
DNA of the brand is always there. Don’t create products that your
customer doesn’t understand and doesn’t want. Create for real
people; don’t just create product for the sake of it.”
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