Elliot Moss
Welcome to the Jazz Shapers Podcast from Mishcon de Reya. What you are about to hear was originally broadcast on Jazz FM however the music has been cut due to rights issues.
That was Wilson Pickett with Funky Broadway. Welcome to Jazz Shapers with me, Elliot Moss, bringing the shapers of the business world together with the musicians shaping jazz, soul and blues. My guest today, is Kate Halfpenny, designer and Founder of British luxury bridal wear brand, Halfpenny London. During a 20 year career as a stylist working on television campaigns and music videos, Kate dressed some of the world’s most iconic women such as Cate Blanchett, Rhianna and Kate Moss but it was after designing two wedding dresses for her friend, actress Emilia, that Kate was, as she says, inundated with requests and began designing on the side. Having spotted a gap in the market for UK made detachable bridal pieces in exclusive fabrics, Kate launched Halfpenny London from her home in 2005 and in 2012 encouraged by her husband to take the leap of faith, she moved the business and the brides out of her living room and found a shop in Bloomsbury, London. Halfpenny London now retails not only from that Bloomsbury boutique but Harrods, Net-a-Porter and from stockists around the world and aiming to design with a conscience the gowns are made to order ensuring no wasted stock. It’s fabulous to have you here.
Kate Halfpenny
Thank you for having me, I am honoured to be on your incredible show.
Elliot Moss
It’s a visual delight as well. For those of you who can’t see Kate, and that’s all of you, Kate is wearing the most brilliant glasses, an amazing collection of jewellery and a really simple but cool, what do you call it a dre… it’s like a shirt dress.
Kate Halfpenny
It’s like a big shirt dress, yeah. Effortless.
Elliot Moss
The reason I say this is rather than sounding deliciously superficial which I can do all day, it is because obviously your world is the world of fashion and style and it’s in our blood I guess and before the business was the business you were styling people?
Kate Halfpenny
It was, I think I’ve been obsessed since being a child of people’s clothes and drawing and shapes and dresses and fabrics and yarns and everything to do with textiles really so it just was a natural progression. I don’t know how I was awarded this badge of honour to tell people what to wear but it seems to have worked and I’ve carved a magical career for the last well, I’m nearly 50 so, however many years that was.
Elliot Moss
You’re very young. In terms of that though of course, your mum was in the business as it were and I read that your grandma taught you how to use a sewing machine.
Kate Halfpenny
Yes, my grandmother was a denim machinist, she was fixing all of Rolls Royce’s overalls so that was in the day when they didn’t just throw them away if you tore the back pocket on a piece of machinery or the crutch went or you know, there was a tear in the leg. They would all be patched and repaired and you know, for me I love that about clothes. My husband loves things darned in his trousers now and I think there’s a really big resurgent in repair and re-wear and all of that so she taught me yeah, the craft of sewing on a really very old machine that well used to be manual that was then turned into a, an electric one and mother, she was a knitwear designer, that was the second kind of part of her career having been a dental nurse for many years. She always wanted to go to art college and her parents were like, no secretary school and then various things as you did a post-War baby. So I was always surrounded by creativity and mum would do things like take a wooden curtain pole and have some saws in the garage and things and she’d cut them up and she’d paint on these little discs with the kind of the frilly edge of those wooden curtain poles and paint them so I was surrounded by craft and creativity my entire life really.
Elliot Moss
It’s a tactile thing though isn’t it dealing with textiles…
Kate Halfpenny
Yeah.
Elliot Moss
…as well as the visual piece. Was that also literally around you and if so, what, if you recall, what was the first bit of texture and what was the first piece of material that you thought well this is interesting? And do you remember how old you were?
Kate Halfpenny
I don’t remember the physical textile but what I do remember is being surrounded by amazing interiors that my mum would create and she was obsessed with Laura Ashley back then when I was growing up and when Laura Ashley was doing what people are starting to do again now is you match your wallpaper to your bedsheets, to your, to your quilts, to your cushions, to everything. I remember I had this kidney shaped dressing table and she’d cut the wallpaper and put it under the glass so even, everything like it was… I was just immersed in print and pattern and I hated it as a child actually but now it’s, it’s kind of shaped me, it’s really been something that gives you the foundation of you know, I am obsessed with interiors, we are on our fourth kind of property that we are renovating and I just bought a little shop in Faversham with an Airbnb and I think that’s because I love just doing things up mainly.
Elliot Moss
And the doing things up before we get to the business, obviously you were doing people up for quite a while.
Kate Halfpenny
Doing people up yes, yeah.
Elliot Moss
And what was that like firstly, the actual doing of that before you got into, to making things but secondly dealing with famous people because I mentioned a few people that most people would have heard of.
Kate Halfpenny
Yeah. Do you know what I must say the, the more famous the person that I worked with, the easier they were, the more gracious they were and the more appreciative of what we were creating, what the art, the styling or whatever we were working on at the time was for. The less famous people, the new starters, the new musicians that were just kind of, it was their first music video or they were being interviewed for something, they were always far more difficult, they didn’t… because it was also very alien to them for somebody to come along and say, ‘right I’ve got these outfits’ and you know, held you make… you feel the most amazing you know, that’s my mantra now with my bridal dresses, it’s I want to make you feel the very best version of yourself and be the person that you want to be, not try and be anybody else.
Elliot Moss
You said something which I just liked the phrase, you said you know, you kind of made people look good, that’s what you did before you moved into bridal wear and you sort of said something like, I don’t know how I got the honour of managing to do that, how did that happen? The making it up and you deciding what colour and you deciding what look, that’s an amazing privilege. Are you happy making things up? Is that where you are your happiest versus following a set of rules or a format?
Kate Halfpenny
I mean I’m, I’m a rule breaker, I don’t… I never really worked for anybody. For me that, I think it applies to my life, my business, I just yeah, I make things up, I style it out, I, like we said before this interview, I don’t kind of work to a set of questions or a set of rules. I suppose like kind of you know, I wing it a little bit and I have done throughout my entire life and when it’s time to turn right, I turn left and I love the happy accidents that have come along with my career and my work and the bridal was always just a passion. I did my Degree in the late 90s and specialised in womenswear then. It was a Degree with marketing and manufacturing so I had to look at the cost of making things, to how you marketed something and what happened there was I identified yeah there’s a massive gap in the market right back then of cool bridal wear that wasn’t so stuffy and looked like the dolls that you put on top of a toilet roll and kind of really…
Elliot Moss
In my grandma’s bathroom.
Kate Halfpenny
Did she, she had one.
Elliot Moss
I just…
Kate Halfpenny
They were ama… they need to come back.
Elliot Moss
I just got a flashback into sunny Stanmore Hill circa 1985 and that bathroom, toilet actually it wasn’t even a bathroom and there was…
Kate Halfpenny
There was the dolly.
Elliot Moss
…there was the dolly.
Kate Halfpenny
So I saw then that there was a gap in the market for something cool and different and that was yeah, literally late 90s and I also identified that it was a really lucrative market to go into because some pieces could essentially look like a day dress but would have a larger value because it was a special item and that’s kind of what I looked at back then. It’s very different now because actually the way that we make things, it’s all British made and it justifies its value but back then when I was researching I was thinking, some of these dresses it didn’t make, nothing made sense.
Elliot Moss
And that thing you said about just following you know, partly contrarian but I think it’s more than that, I think it’s just your inner confidence to say you know what, I feel like… or instinct, and you go over there and you do your thing. Was it a leap of faith in 2005 or was it just, okay well I’ll give this a go, when you actually set the business up?
Kate Halfpenny
I, when I graduated I did, so my year in industry I worked for Vivien Westwood and I did my internship then and quite quickly realised then that I didn’t want to work for another fashion brand, I didn’t really fit in, I wanted to be more hands on, more creative and then met these incredible graduates from the Royal College that were creating costumes for amazing TV commercials and it was really hands on and so I kind of fell into this, this route by just meeting people, I just loved the serendipitous kind of way that I fell into this career and the bridal wear then sort of took a back seat because I had all intention of kind of doing something with that as a career and I just made them dresses on the side, people like, oh you know how to do a wedding dress and you know I’d make friend’s wedding dresses and then it got to 2005 and I started dressing Emilia Fox for her job and helping her with her interior and the natural progression that we became friends from spending so much time together and it was her wedding and I dressed her and her husband back then, Jared Harris and at her wedding her best friend said to me, ‘you’ve captured her in every stitch of that dress’ and it really kind of floored me to think gosh the power that I have to make people feel and look the very best version of themselves and, and really capture who they are within these dresses and it did, it really took off from then, you know, it was all word of mouth, it was pre the internet and we bumped into her aunt who worked at Vogue and she said, oh you know, you do wedding dresses, you did that amazing one for Emilia and they did a little line for me in Vogue, I created a website, Emilia modelled and the birth of the brand was then so…
Elliot Moss
So it wasn’t a leap of faith in fact it was just…
Kate Halfpenny
Not really.
Elliot Moss
…it was just where you went next?
Kate Halfpenny
Yeah it was almost a forced kind of journey you know, Vogue are now writing about me, I haven’t got a website, Emilia was like, ‘I’ll model for you’, okay my friend Kat will shoot the pictures and that’s kind of how again, winged it for the next three seasons.
Elliot Moss
Suddenly it was just natural and the next down to earth thing to do.
Kate Halfpenny
Yeah.
Elliot Moss
Well that’s what Kate Halfpenny did and she created a business called Halfpenny London. So if you are thinking about doing it, just follow your next step right?
Kate Halfpenny
Do it.
Elliot Moss
Just go and do it. She’ll becoming back in a couple of minutes to talk about all sorts of other things as well but right now it’s time to hear a taster from the Mishcon Innovation series which can be found on all the major podcast platforms. Natasha Knight invites business Founders to share their industry insights and practical advice for those of you thinking about of getting into an industry and starting your very own thing. In this clip from a conversation on the supply chain ethics and manufacturing we hear from Flora Davidson, Co-Founder of SupplyCompass, the end-to-end fashion software changing the way brands and manufacturers work together.
All our former Business Shapers await you on the Jazz Shapers podcast and you can of course hear this very programme again if you pop Jazz Shapers into your podcast platform of choice. My guest today right here, right now is Kate Halfpenny, Founder of British luxury bridal wear brand Halfpenny London. The British thing is interesting to me and you mentioned before about where stuff was made and that was part of your Degree and I assume it was an important part of the Degree in terms of manufacturing. Why is the British thing important, is it because you as a British person have a certain take on the world which is different to the Italian take on dresses or, I am just trying, I am interested in how important the British bit is?
Kate Halfpenny
The British bit is so important to me because I grew up in Derbyshire which was a real hub for manufacturing and I saw the devastation that happened when the factories were bought by companies from Asia that then came over, took all this amazing machinery like, we were at the forefront of manufacturing for so many things in Derbyshire and Yorkshire and it really did impact my family and my friend’s father was the MD of a big factory called Celestian Textiles back then that used to make all the underwear for Marks and Spencer and then it all went abroad so I just saw the impact it had on the UK and the economy and I was quite young back then and I think I just felt, gosh we had something really special and then they came, learnt from us and took it all away and now we don’t have that incredible place of manufacturing, it’s not a job really that is proud to be a machinist you know, my grandmother was so proud of what career she had as that machinist and you know, I, I really do dream of working with people that are out of work potentially or, or kids from school and educating them in how incredible it is to have a career within fashion, within the manufacturing side of it and more and more factories are popping up all over the place and all of our factories are within, within the M25 now and it’s exciting to be, it’s so much easier as well to visit them and…
Elliot Moss
Yeah. I remember…
Kate Halfpenny
…work with them.
Elliot Moss
…you’ve just reminded me I interviewed Emma Bridgewater a few years ago.
Kate Halfpenny
Oh yes.
Elliot Moss
And she was talking all about a Thatcher, I think it was in Stoke.
Kate Halfpenny
Yeah exactly.
Elliot Moss
And how British craft is a thing that needs to be focussed on.
Kate Halfpenny
It really does.
Elliot Moss
It needs to be kind of reinvested in and for you as a business person now then straddling that world of, hold on a minute I’ve got a P&L and I’ve got to think about these things beyond your love of textiles. How have you synthesised creativity and the cost of manufacturing and all the other things that go with running a business or has that again just flowed?
Kate Halfpenny
It’s just flowed and I am fortunate I’ve got an incredible team that I work with that help us to stay on track with, with kind of your P&L’s and your you know, the cost of manufacturing and we’ve got a high value item here and it’s made with beautiful textiles and the craft of that garment is so very important anyway that it needs to be made beautifully and it needs to be made well and it’s not mass produced so the cost for me has always been high because of the small quantities that we are making, I am not a massive manufacturing bridal brand, I’m you know…
Elliot Moss
Yeah.
Kate Halfpenny
…so it’s…
Elliot Moss
Is it easy to set the price for a, for an object like that?
Kate Halfpenny
I mean the price is set based on the cost and the materials involved and the, and the sums that you do in order to wholesale and then to retail and all of those things in between. I think these days people appreciate the craft and they want to know the notoriety of where it’s been manufactured and, and the materials I mean, the sustainable journey for us we are on a massive ship turning you know, we want to start looking at cloth that is you know, there’s a lot of talk around the mushroom fabrics and all the different things. People want fancy fabrics and I want to work out how we can do that in a more sustainable way but how we look at that side and I’ve completely changed the subject but it is by everything is made to order so there isn’t tonnes that end up in landfill and we sell all of our samples at sample sales so everything impacts the cost.
Elliot Moss
Interchangeable separates in English that means?
Kate Halfpenny
Tops and skirts.
Elliot Moss
Tops and skirts, right, right and I love researching things that you wouldn’t naturally think I would be interested in, in fact what happens is the brilliant thing about, about doing this programme is that I am a magpie, like you, I think in a different way where I just like, oh that’s interesting. I knew nothing about interchangeable separates, tops and skirts especially not though, and again, this is me showing my ignorance but, but I think this was your opportunity, in the market of bridal that isn’t a thing or it wasn’t a thing. It was like no, no there’s I remember…
Kate Halfpenny
It’s a wedding dress.
Elliot Moss
…it’s a dress. You wear the dress. In doing that, the other thing I read about which I thought was very nice you said, look we make our stuff not to hide your body but to show it off.
Kate Halfpenny
Yeah.
Elliot Moss
And again my experience of people trying to try on the new dress.
Kate Halfpenny
All the WedSheds and all those crazy diets people do.
Elliot Moss
All that stuff, it’s mental absolutely crazy. How much is that a focus for you, this showing off bit versus hiding and how do you ensure…
Kate Halfpenny
It’s so important.
Elliot Moss
…and how do you ensure you do it every time or is it kind of easy?
Kate Halfpenny
I just think the messaging around my brand and what we do is really, it is be the bride you want to be, it’s so it’s kind of cut out the noise of what you think you should be or what your peers or family have always sort of said, oh you shouldn’t wear that or you need to wear this. Do what you want to do, this is your one opportunity to do something and actually it’s not just about that day, it’s about your whole life and secondly I really encourage people to find a dress that works for them, not finding a dress that they need to work out for, I don’t think if you are going to have to shed you know, half a stone, a stone, five stone whatever to look good in something then that’s not necessarily the right thing for you to do because you know, we are what we are, I’m a curvy girl myself, I’ve never, you know I’ve never been able to fit in any of the press samples I’ve borrowed for years for all my celebrities and I think that’s almost why it made me so good at what I did without blowing my own trumpet because I wasn’t dressing these people how I dressed or how I wanted to dress, I just was using amazing clothes to enhance somebodies body and appearance and bring out personality within clothes and that’s exactly what we do now with the bridal wear.
Elliot Moss
Is it, is it quite emotional when you…
Kate Halfpenny
So emotional.
Elliot Moss
You talk about Emilia when the friend said you know, you’ve literally captured her. I imagine you get that fix every time you see…
Kate Halfpenny
Yeah.
Elliot Moss
…your, your bride to be?
Kate Halfpenny
Sundays are my favourite days of the week because I get all these alerts on Instagram from brides or the photographers or their friends that have been… or Saturday night and into Sunday morning of the wedding and seeing these creations that me and the team have made and it’s, it’s really wonderful. It is so emotional and it is the best part of my job is having the privilege that these people trust me to create something for the most important day of their life where it comes to wearing something really.
Elliot Moss
What happened during Covid though of course people couldn’t get married and your business would… did it suffer or did people just go and do stuff anyway?
Kate Halfpenny
No we were fortunate not to. I mean I suppose this year we have seen the pinch of the fact that we had a whole period of time where people didn’t order their dress because we take an order and it’s at least six months in advance in order for us to get the materials and to arrange the fitting so there was that kind of area but actually we had to turn down so many brides after Covid because of the impact on the supply chain that we couldn’t get materials for, you know, they just were stuck on boats or they weren’t being made because of outages of electricity in countries or you know, just yarns coming from, from China that needed to go to Italy and various kind of reasons but no, we didn’t hugely, we didn’t hugely get impacted by Covid because the brides were still getting married and all the ones that had pre-ordered that simply had to just shunt their date, the problem we had was the fittings after and then fitting everyone in for that but.
Elliot Moss
Who knew.
Kate Halfpenny
Who knew.
Elliot Moss
Who knew that that was a thing during Covid, actually you had a backlog. Well there you go.
Kate Halfpenny
Yeah.
Elliot Moss
Final chat coming up with my guest today, it’s Kate Halfpenny, and there is some genius form Jacob Collier in the mix too. That’s in just a moment, don’t go anywhere.
Kate Halfpenny is my Business Shaper just for a few more minutes. We touched on sustainability earlier and the world has kind of moved into this notion of a circular economy and all that. I mean you talked about using every last piece and obviously things are made on a personalised basis. Have you really thought how you make dresses or is it more a question of taking what you’ve got and going well I can change a little bit here and I can change a little bit there in terms of the manufacturing process. I am just interested how radical you are being about this or whether it’s just a sort of ameliorate where you currently are at?
Kate Halfpenny
We have created quite a beast actually with this whole topic in the fact that there is a skirt that’s really popular that we make and its circles and circles of silk organza and from the circles that we cut out if you think when you cut a circle out of a square there’s triangles round the outside but then this circle we cut another circle out of the middle, quite a big circle so these circles are big and they make frills and so we’d have piles and piles of these beautiful circles, perfectly ironed circles and triangles from around these pieces of fabric we’ve cut and it was my mum actually that said you know, I am sure we can do something with them and she hand cut little flowers from the middles from these circles and triangles and then we layered them up like petals so it is really a very beautiful couture technique. However, I then put them on a collection of, I put the… you know just on one dress then I did a whole collection using these flowers and that collection really went absolutely bananas and stockists around the world all bought into this to the extent now that we need to make, god, millions of these tiny little things.
Elliot Moss
How are you going to do that then?
Kate Halfpenny
Exactly. So now the whole process of stacking these circles up and so we still, we still use all of our waste silk organza to cut as many as we can. I mean sometimes and some months we do have to roll…
Elliot Moss
Is it manual though or is it…?
Kate Halfpenny
Yeah it’s manual.
Elliot Moss
So if you need an extra hand…
Kate Halfpenny
Yeah.
Elliot Moss
I’m, I’m not great but I can be taught and in terms of just going back to something we talked about at the beginning, the making it up bit and just following the next step and the next step. What’s going to happen in the next few years for you and your business? Is it going to be a lot more circles? Are there going to be other things?
Kate Halfpenny
A lot more circles yeah.
Elliot Moss
A lot more circles, we’ve got that bit. But in terms of developing it, will you ever move out of bridal?
Kate Halfpenny
I mean we are…
Elliot Moss
Or is that ridiculous?
Kate Halfpenny
…we are excitedly launching some coloured dresses this, for event wear for Christmas with Harrods so that’s, that’s nice that you can actually get dresses that might have been your wedding dress or a look of within Harrods in a colour.
Elliot Moss
But it, it feels like if you were inspired one day, if you got some creative juice going you’d be like, do you know what, I think we should be thinking about dresses over here or, or other womenswear over here. Is that likely to happen or does it just depend where Kate’s head is?
Kate Halfpenny
It just depends where mine and my teams head is.
Elliot Moss
Because it’s a very strong brand, you talk about brand a lot and obviously the brand the reason its strong is you haven’t diluted it and there is a focus.
Kate Halfpenny
Yeah, for me it’s all about being authentic for a start so if you want to create a business then you need to have something that somebody wants and it needs to not be fake and forced like today so many people chuck something on Instagram and its, oh I’ve got this business and it’s brilliant or you know, we were one of the first hundred businesses to Instagram and it’s been wonderful to watch the growth and it has been a massive driver for us. Globally we did an influencers wedding dress before it was even kind of cool to do that and that massively pushed us out there through, through those social channels but I think yeah, I just think whatever we do and whichever way we turn myself and my team, we always kind of think of the bigger picture and what it means to our brand and the passion and the love that we all have for what we are doing so yeah, we have grown hugely to kind of nearing thirty members of staff now from this tiny little seed that I planted back then so it’s yeah.
Elliot Moss
Is that okay though, is that still joyful? Do you mind managing more people?
Kate Halfpenny
It’s still joyful, it’s… I am fortunate to have an amazing MD and an amazing Heads of Department and yes we need to grow more, they are all need more assistance and teams within all of those departments and it, it is a joy and I am so inspired to see, we’ve just finished another collection which we launched last month in New York. The dream team really is dreamily knitted together and first time in kind of a good couple of years that I just feel there’s a huge synergy between every department, they are all singing off the same page and it’s exciting to see that and what can be achieved.
Elliot Moss
It’s been great talking to you, Kate Halfpenny.
Kate Halfpenny
Thank you for having me.
Elliot Moss
It’s an absolute pleasure. Just before I let you wander off and come up with another idea, before whenever it might be today. What’s your song choice and why have you chosen it?
Kate Halfpenny
It’s Stevie Wonder, You Are The Sunshine Of My Life and it is the song that I now sing to Silvester every night.
Elliot Moss
Your son?
Kate Halfpenny
Yeah, that’s my seven year old son and it’s our first dance song from our wedding and it’s because my cheesy, amazing, creative, brilliant husband, I’d phone him and he’d answer the phone singing you are the sunshine of my life, and it… when we were choosing our wedding song I was just like there is no other song is there than that one so yeah.
Elliot Moss
Stevie Wonder there with You Are The Sunshine Of My Life, the song choice of my Business Shaper today, Kate Halfpenny. She talked about being a rule breaker, she talked about making things up, she talked about her love of happy accidents and really nicely, she talked about her belief, her deep seated belief in Britain as a manufacturing power house. Really great stuff. That’s it from me and Jazz Shapers, have a lovely weekend.
We hope you enjoyed that edition of Jazz Shapers. You’ll find hundreds of more guests available for you to listen to in our archive, to find out more just search Jazz Shapers in iTunes or your favourite podcast platform or head over to Mishcon.com/JazzShapers.