![HK TST K11 mall 20 shop Laura Ashley clothing](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f5/HK_TST_K11_mall_20_shop_Laura_Ashley_clothing.JPG)
Laura Ashley plc () was a British
textile design company now controlled by the
MUI Group
Malayan United Industries Berhad (MUI; ) was founded in 1960, and owned by Khoo Kay Peng. The main businesses of the group includes retailing, hotels, food and confectionery, financial services, property, travel and tourism. The group has business ...
of Malaysia. It was founded by
Bernard Ashley, an engineer, and his wife
Laura Ashley
Laura Ashley (née Mountney; 7 September 1925 – 17 September 1985) was a Welsh fashion designer and businesswoman. She originally made furnishing materials in the 1950s, expanding the business into clothing design and manufacture in the 1960s ...
in 1953 then grew over the next 20 years to become an international retail chain. Sales totalled over £276 million in 2000. Its products have been described as 'quintessentially English.'
[Funding Universe]
Company Histories & Profiles: Laura Ashley Holdings plc
On 17 March 2020, the company filed for
administration
Administration may refer to:
Management of organizations
* Management, the act of directing people towards accomplishing a goal
** Administrative Assistant, traditionally known as a Secretary, or also known as an administrative officer, admini ...
. All its stores are now officially closed from January 2021.
History
Origins
After
World War II
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposing ...
, Bernard Ashley met Welsh secretary Laura Mountney at a youth club in
Wallington, London
Wallington is a town in the London Borough of Sutton, in South London, England. It is south south-west of Charing Cross. Before the Municipal Borough of Beddington and Wallington merged into the London Borough of Sutton in Greater London in 196 ...
. While working as a secretary and raising her first two children, part-time she designed napkins, table mats, and tea-towels which Bernard printed on a machine he had designed in an attic flat in
Pimlico,
London
London is the capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary dow ...
.
The couple had invested £10 in wood for the screen frame, dyes and a few yards of linen. Laura's inspiration to start producing printed fabric came from a
Women's Institute
The Women's Institute (WI) is a community-based organisation for women in the United Kingdom, Canada, South Africa and New Zealand. The movement was founded in Stoney Creek, Ontario, Canada, by Erland and Janet Lee with Adelaide Hoodless being the ...
display of traditional handicrafts at the
Victoria & Albert Museum
The Victoria and Albert Museum (often abbreviated as the V&A) in London is the world's largest museum of applied arts, decorative arts and design, housing a permanent collection of over 2.27 million objects. It was founded in 1852 and nam ...
. When Laura looked for small patches carrying Victorian designs to help her make patchworks, she found no such thing existed. Here was an opportunity, and she started to print Victorian style headscarves in 1953.
Audrey Hepburn inadvertently sparked the growth of one of the world's most successful fashion and home furnishing companies. Hepburn appeared alongside
Gregory Peck in the 1953 film ''
Roman Holiday
''Roman Holiday'' is a 1953 American romantic comedy film directed and produced by William Wyler. It stars Audrey Hepburn as a princess out to see Rome on her own and Gregory Peck as a reporter. Hepburn won an Academy Award for Best Actress f ...
'', wearing a headscarf. As such a fashion icon, she instantly created a style that became popular around the globe.
The Ashleys' scarves quickly became successful with stores, retailing both via
mail order
Mail order is the buying of goods or services by mail delivery. The buyer places an order for the desired products with the merchant through some remote methods such as:
* Sending an order form in the mail
* Placing a telephone call
* Placing ...
and high street chains such as
John Lewis
John Robert Lewis (February 21, 1940 – July 17, 2020) was an American politician and civil rights activist who served in the United States House of Representatives for from 1987 until his death in 2020. He participated in the 1960 Nashville ...
.
From 1953, Bernard left his city job and the couple began to expand the company, initially named Ashley Mountney Ltd incorporating Laura Ashley's maiden name.
Laura designed the prints and Bernard built the printing equipment, so forging a complementary partnership that was to give the company its unique strength throughout the years. Laura remained in charge of design until shortly before her death, while Bernard handled the operational side.
Employing staff to cope with the growth of sales, the company name was changed to Laura Ashley because Bernard felt a woman's name was more appropriate for the type of products.
Expansion
The new company moved to
Kent
Kent is a county in South East England and one of the home counties. It borders Greater London to the north-west, Surrey to the west and East Sussex to the south-west, and Essex to the north across the estuary of the River Thames; it faces ...
in 1955, but the business was nearly wiped out in 1958, when the
River Darent
The Darent is a Kentish tributary of the River Thames and takes the waters of the River Cray as a tributary in the tidal portion of the Darent near Crayford, as illustrated by the adjacent photograph, snapped at high tide. 'Darenth' is frequen ...
overflowed – leaving equipment, dyes, and fabrics floating in three feet of water.
Turnover rose from £2,000 to £8,000 in 1960, which left them looking for new premises. As the new
M4 Motorway had just been built, Laura suggested Wales as there was much space, and driving up the new road one weekend, found a suitable house and shop available for a sum below their residual savings in
Machynlleth
Machynlleth () is a market town, community and electoral ward in Powys, Wales and within the historic boundaries of Montgomeryshire. It is in the Dyfi Valley at the intersection of the A487 and the A489 roads. At the 2001 Census it had a pop ...
,
Powys
Powys (; ) is a county and preserved county in Wales. It is named after the Kingdom of Powys which was a Welsh successor state, petty kingdom and principality that emerged during the Middle Ages following the end of Roman rule in Britain.
Geog ...
.
The family moved to Wales in 1961, just after the birth of their third child. The first shop opened at 35 Maengwyn Street, which still today trades as an interior design shop, and the Laura Ashley association is commemorated by a small plaque. The family lived above the shop for six years before moving to
Carno
Carno is a village in Powys, Wales. The community, which is also a parish in the historic county of Montgomeryshire, comprises the townships of Derlwyn, Llysyn, and Trowscoed. It is in the geographical centre of Wales.
Geography
The Afon Car ...
,
Montgomeryshire
, HQ= Montgomery
, Government= Montgomeryshire County Council (1889–1974)Montgomeryshire District Council (1974–1996)
, Origin=
, Status=
, Start=
, End= ...
.
The Ashleys' first Welsh factory was originally located in the social club in Carno; in 1967 the factory moved across to the village's former
railway station
Rail transport (also known as train transport) is a means of transport that transfers passengers and goods on wheeled vehicles running on rails, which are incorporated in tracks. In contrast to road transport, where the vehicles run on a prep ...
.
These were crucial times in the development of the company. Bernard had developed his flat-bed printing process to produce 5,000 metres of fabric per week, and in 1966 Laura produced her first dress for social rather than work attire. The long length silhouette became the Laura Ashley trademark. It also was to work successfully in the company's favour, as fashion switched from the mini to the maxi skirt at the end of the 1960s.
A newspaper suggested that by donning a Laura Ashley number, women could look as beautiful as
Katharine Ross
Katharine Juliet Ross (born January 29, 1940) is an American film, stage, and television actress. Her accolades include one Academy Award nomination, one BAFTA Award, and two Golden Globe Awards. A native of Los Angeles, Ross spent most of her ...
in the film ''
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid''.
Retail shops
The first shop under the Laura Ashley name opened in Pelham Street,
South Kensington
South Kensington, nicknamed Little Paris, is a district just west of Central London in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. Historically it settled on part of the scattered Middlesex village of Brompton. Its name was supplanted with ...
, in 1968,
with additional shops opened in
Shrewsbury and
Bath in 1970. In one week alone, London's
Fulham Road
Fulham Road is a street in London, England, which comprises the A304 and part of the A308.
Overview
Fulham Road ( the A219) runs from Putney Bridge as "Fulham High Street" and then eastward to Fulham Broadway, in the London Borough of Hamme ...
shop sold 4,000 dresses
– which resulted in the new factory in
Newtown, Montgomeryshire. It was the opening of the
Paris
Paris () is the Capital city, capital and List of communes in France with over 20,000 inhabitants, most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), ma ...
shop in 1974
which was the first to feature the distinctive green frontage and stripped wooden interior; and in the same year the first U.S. shop opened in
San Francisco
San Francisco (; Spanish for " Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous in California and 17th ...
.
A licensing operation led to the opening of department store concessions in
Australia,
Canada
Canada is a country in North America. Its ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and northward into the Arctic Ocean, covering over , making it the world's second-largest country by tot ...
, and
Japan from 1971 onwards.
By 1975, turnover was £5 million per year and the company employed 1,000 people worldwide. Laura turned down the offer of an
OBE because her husband Bernard was not also offered the honour, but a
Queen's Award for Export
The Queen's Awards for Enterprise is an awards programme for British businesses and other organizations who excel at international trade, innovation, sustainable development or promoting opportunity (through social mobility). They are the highest ...
was accepted in 1977.
Turnover reached £25 million in 1979, and a range of perfume was launched.
The addition of a home in France enabled Laura to go back to her roots of fabric design, and the company launched its home furnishings collections.
By the time of Laura Ashley's death in 1985, the company had over 220 stores around the world, employed over 4,000 people and turned over US$130 million annually.
Public company
Two months after Laura Ashley's death in 1985, Laura Ashley Holdings plc went public in a flotation that was 34 times oversubscribed.
That same year, the first store in Japan was opened in Tokyo.
Chairman Bernard Ashley accepted a knighthood in 1987, the same year in which the company opened a new factory, called Texplan, for printing fabrics and wallpapers, and launched new child and home furnishings ranges.
In the early 1990s, Laura Ashley plc was suffering from a combination of over expansion of its retail outlets and dependence on what had become an overly complex and costly outsourced network of manufacturers. In 1991, American
James Maxmin
James is a common English language surname and given name:
*James (name), the typically masculine first name James
* James (surname), various people with the last name James
James or James City may also refer to:
People
* King James (disambiguati ...
became the CEO at Laura Ashley, aiming to refocus the company on its core business. Over the next two and a half years, Maxmin led a series of changes, addressing problems in manufacturing and logistics that foreshadowed principles of his later book, ''
The Support Economy
''The'' () is a grammatical Article (grammar), article in English language, English, denoting persons or things already mentioned, under discussion, implied or otherwise presumed familiar to listeners, readers, or speakers. It is the definite ...
'', co-authored with his wife, Harvard Business School Professor
Shoshana Zuboff. One of the most significant initiatives at this time was a strategic alliance with
FedEx, forming a sort of proto-federation, aimed at improving distribution for close to 500 Laura Ashley stores.
The alliance was established as a 10-year partnership, but it was relatively open-ended, premised on trust. The objective was to be able to supply 99 percent of Laura Ashley's merchandise to customers anywhere in the world within 48 hours. The alliance replaced a legacy system that would route a T-shirt manufactured in Hong Kong to a warehouse in Newtown, Wales, before sending it to a retail store in Japan.
In 1992, Maxmin led Laura Ashley to its first profits since 1989, and in 1993 profits were expected to reach £12 million. Laura Ashley plc celebrated its 40th anniversary in 1993, the same year that Sir Bernard retired as chairman and became honorary life president.
But in early April 1994 Maxmin abruptly resigned from Laura Ashley, citing major differences with Sir Bernard over strategy.
Over the next five years, four individuals were given the Chief Executive role in quick succession in an attempt to find a solution to the growing financial difficulties of the company, during which time the company's bankers became increasingly concerned.
A new source of finance was desperately needed, and this was found in 1998 in a new relationship with the Malaysian MUI Group.
MUI Asia management
In May 1998,
MUI Asia Limited became a major shareholder in Laura Ashley Holdings plc and under the new management, this world famous international brand was back in profit. Rescued from the receivers in 1998, 58 per cent of the shares are believed to be controlled directly or indirectly by the company's chairman Dr
Khoo Kay Peng
Tan Sri Khoo Kay Peng (; born December 1939) is a Malaysian Chinese businessman. He is the chairman and a major shareholder of Laura Ashley plc, and the owner of MUI Group.
Early life
Khoo Kay Peng was born in December 1939.
Career
Khoo was men ...
. Part of the rescue of the parent company involved selling off the United States operations for the sum of $1, the buyer being a company also controlled by MUI. All retail stores were subsequently closed and the Laura Ashley brand is now represented in the USA through its e-commerce business.
Laura Ashley experienced several setbacks in the early years of the new century. In October 2002 it launched a £18m lawsuit against
L'Oréal
L'Oréal S.A. () is a French personal care company headquartered in Clichy, Hauts-de-Seine with a registered office in Paris. It is the world's largest cosmetics company and has developed activities in the field concentrating on hair color, ...
, which manufactured the Laura Ashley perfumes; Laura Ashley was eventually awarded a reduced amount of damages, which however did not even cover the legal costs of the suit. A positive direction seemed to be underway early in 2004 with the establishment of a relationship with Scottish couture designer
Alistair Blair, who had previously designed for
Dior and
Givenchy
Givenchy (, ) is a French luxury fashion and perfume house. It hosts the brand of haute couture and ready-to-wear clothing, accessories, perfumes and cosmetics of Parfums Givenchy. The house of Givenchy was founded in 1952 by designer Hubert de ...
, and soon afterwards the company posted a profit compared with the loss of the previous year, especially on the back of an expansion of home furnishing sales although clothing sales continued to decline. However, by the end of the year the arrangement with Blair was terminated. Laura Ashley closed its flagship store on London's Regent Street in late 2005 because of rent increases.
Despite these issues, profitability seemed to be returning to the company in the years immediately prior to the 2007
Global Financial Crisis
Global means of or referring to a globe and may also refer to:
Entertainment
* ''Global'' (Paul van Dyk album), 2003
* ''Global'' (Bunji Garlin album), 2007
* ''Global'' (Humanoid album), 1989
* ''Global'' (Todd Rundgren album), 2015
* Bruno ...
. Profits for 2005 stood at £6.1 million, and this figure was doubled in 2006 to £12.2 million, representing the strongest performance since the MUI buyout. Both fashion and home accessories were attributed as strong areas for the company at this time.
There were some areas of concern emerging as the Global Financial Crisis took hold. The company was criticised in 2009 for price discrepancies, which meant Irish customers were charged more than their UK counterparts for the same items, a situation which Laura Ashley justified. The following year the company was involved in an acrimonious industrial dispute, again in the
Republic of Ireland
Ireland ( ga, Éire ), also known as the Republic of Ireland (), is a country in north-western Europe consisting of 26 of the 32 Counties of Ireland, counties of the island of Ireland. The capital and largest city is Dublin, on the eastern ...
. In 2011 the company was found to be in breach of fair employment conditions in a case raised in Northern Ireland and was required to pay compensation to the aggrieved employee. In 2012 the company responded with complacency to a significant number of negative online consumer reviews, pointing to improving sales and profitability figures, but the Financial Times, perhaps somewhat prophetically, commented "Laura Ashley may be right to shrug off online criticism. However, no company can expect to do well for ever. Web reviews, particularly when many persistently repeat the same complaints, may indicate looming difficulties".
Some signs of weakness in the company were seen when in early 2016 Laura Ashley's Australian operations entered voluntary administration, but they managed to trade out of the difficulties and in the event remained afloat for more than a further two years.
There were some changes and pull-backs for Laura Ashley internationally in 2018. Early in the year, the long-standing relationship with Japanese company
Aeon
The word aeon , also spelled eon (in American and Australian English), originally meant "life", "vital force" or "being", "generation" or "a period of time", though it tended to be translated as "age" in the sense of "ages", "forever", "timele ...
was terminated by Aeon due to reduced profitability of their Laura Ashley operations. All 120 stores in Japan closed in September that year. However, as the Aeon relationship was expiring in September 2018, it was announced that the Master Licence arrangement previously with Aeon had been taken up by the large
Itochu Corporation
is a Japanese corporation based in Umeda, Kita-ku, Osaka and Aoyama, Minato, Tokyo.
It is one of the largest Japanese '' sogo shosha'' (general trading companies). Among Japanese trading companies, it is distinguished by not being descen ...
which already had diverse interests in the textiles field. Itochu announced that they intended to "expand the offering at major department stores
ndspecialty stores ... and showcase the appeal of the brand to new customer groups through an official e-commerce site and directly managed shops ... with target retail sales of 8.0 billion yen in three years".
At the very end of the year, Laura Ashley Australia suddenly went into administration, and when no buyer for the operation was found, all stores across Australia, as well as the online business, ceased operating at the end of 2018. New chairman Andrew Khoo was upbeat at the year's end, looking to expand Laura Ashley's online sales and perhaps later a physical presence in the Chinese market.
Setbacks were also experienced in the UK operation. In December 2018 it was announced that 40 stores would close due to poor trading conditions. In February 2019, anticipated poor performance for the financial year was flagged, though an expansion of online sales and hospitality ventures were identified as areas of growth. In August 2019 an expanded annual loss was announced, brought about by declining sales of traditional mainstay products even as new ventures in tearooms and hotels were expanding.
In 2020, following the COVID-19 outbreak, Laura Ashley said it would file for administration, putting 2,700 jobs at risk. After struggling for several years, the company blamed its troubles on a "significant" drop in trade with no end of COVID-19 in sight.
On 22 April 2020, it was announced that investment firm
Gordon Brothers
Gordon Brothers Group, which has its headquarters in Boston, Massachusetts, is a liquidation and restructuring firm that was founded in 1903 by Jacob Gordon.
Notable liquidations
*CompUSA
* G.I. Joe's
*KB Toys
*Linens 'n Things
*Music World
*Th ...
had acquired the Laura Ashley brand name, archives and intellectual property rights out of administration.
In October 2020, it was announced that Laura Ashley would return with a flagship store in the Westfield Shopping Centre in West London in 2021 through
Next
Next may refer to:
Arts and entertainment Film
* ''Next'' (1990 film), an animated short about William Shakespeare
* ''Next'' (2007 film), a sci-fi film starring Nicolas Cage
* '' Next: A Primer on Urban Painting'', a 2005 documentary film
Lit ...
's 500 UK stores & website, and with a series of new stores.
Senior management
Chief Executive Officers
References
External links
Laura Ashley (company website)Our Heritage (Laura Ashley UK company history overview)Our Heritage (Laura Ashley USA company history overview)
{{Authority control
Design companies of the United Kingdom
Clothing companies of the United Kingdom
Companies based in Powys
Companies that have entered administration in the United Kingdom