British Brands Are Dreaming Big in America

London, already Europe’s smallest fashion city, is shrinking even more.

The February edition of London Fashion Week is a day shorter than in the past due to designers dropping off the fall 2025 schedule or decamping to Paris. London menswear, meanwhile, has swerved off the runway and into a new trade and consumer event that highlights fashion, craftsmanship, culture and wellness.

In a tough climate for luxury goods, Burberry has resized its growth expectations under new chief executive officer Joshua Schulman, who’s aiming to restore the brand to its golden days of 3 billion pounds in annual revenue, with an operating margin in the high teens.

London’s biggest brand is also going back to basics, emphasizing the check, the scarf, and the trench, and broadening its pricing to woo back old customers.

Mulberry, another British brand that’s under pressure, is cutting 25 percent of its head office staff and slashing prices amid a 19 percent decline in revenue for the first half, and a pretax loss of 15.7 million pounds.

The city’s online retail sector has been contracting, too. London was once the capital of fashion tech businesses, with Net-a-porter, Matches and Farfetch attracting international investment and competing to please luxury customers with faster service and ever-broader offerings.

Those days are gone. Matches no longer exists while Net-a-porter and its sister businesses have been bought by the Munich-based Mytheresa, with the deal set to close later this year. Former unicorn Farfetch, which slipped into administration in late 2023, is being revamped under its new owner Coupang.

In Britain, the next year is going to be particularly tough due in large part to the new Labour government and its tax increases, the soaring cost of doing business, and a cold climate for luxury demand due mainly to surging prices and the slowdown in China.

Despite it all, brands and designers aren’t giving up. They’re looking beyond London’s runways and finding new avenues for growth, forging new partnerships and pinning their hopes on the U.S. market, despite the threat of tariffs under President-elect Donald Trump.

The American Dream

It wasn’t too long ago that the U.S. was considered a graveyard for British brands, especially those opening their own stores, mostly because they moved too quickly, spent too much money, didn’t research or market themselves properly and opened in the wrong places.

Now, with customer data at their fingertips, they’ve been able to hone their strategies, and better target their communities and customers.

Even Burberry, which wound down much of its wholesale business under former CEO Marco Gobbetti, is looking at the U.S. with fresh eyes under Schulman, an American and former department store executive.

Schulman has brought back U.S. executive Paul Price as Burberry’s chief product merchandising and planning officer and tapped Laura Dubin-Wander, a luxury brand veteran, as president of the Americas.

If British brands can get it right in America, the payoff is potentially huge. The country is already one of the U.K.’s biggest export markets and the opportunities are seemingly endless. At $4 trillion, California’s gross domestic product outstrips that of the U.K. In terms of GDP, Texas and New York are both smaller than Britain — but not by much.

“I meet a new British brand every single week that’s looking for help in the U.S.,” said Justin Lilja, founder and CEO of Runway, a Texas-based company that helps premium retail brands unlock the market. It offers services in business development; wholesale account management; product and merchandising; financial planning, and operational capabilities.

Lilja said brands see the U.S. as a land of opportunity in a post-Brexit, post-COVID-19 world, and following the decimation of U.K. wholesale.

Debenhams, once a national department store chain, is now an online-only business, while the number of House of Fraser stores has nearly halved since retailer Mike Ashley took over the franchise. Over the past five years John Lewis, another national chain, has shut 17 stores.

Lilja, whose background is in wholesale and retail, started Runway after taking British handbag brand Radley from zero to $30 million in U.S. revenue over six years. Radley, which sells at stores including Macy’s, is expanding further and will launch on nordstrom.com in a few weeks’ time.

Even though many American retailers have downsized, they still offer a big opportunity for British brands, said Lilja, who is working with names including Navygrey, Hush, Desmond & Dempsey and the London jeweler Otiumberg.

He said his clients, which sell at stores including Dillard’s, Nordstrom, Saks and Neiman Marcus (the latter three of which are going private, with Saks and Neiman’s merging), have a lot in common: European charm, competitive prices and founder-designers who are willing to tell their stories — about how they made their first sweater, pair of earrings or pleated skirt.

“These brands transport us to different places, and they all have interesting, humble, authentic stories. I always bring the founders with me to the early department store appointments” so they can talk about the brands’ origins, he said.

Other British brands are already seeing their U.S. sales soar and have begun rolling out physical stores.

Marfa Stance, the modular outerwear brand whose founder, Georgia Dant, used to work for Burberry and Rag & Bone, is now operating two successful pop-ups in Manhattan. One in TriBeCa and the other on East 67th Street in New York.

In December, Me+Em opened its fourth U.S. store, and first mall location, at NorthPark in Dallas.

The Dallas opening came just a few months after the brand, a favorite of women including the Princess of Wales, Olivia Colman and Margot Robbie, opened two units in Manhattan and one in East Hampton.

Founder Clare Hornby told WWD that she relies on a mix of data, customer feedback — and intuition — before opening stores, whether they’re in the U.S. or the U.K.

“With Dallas, we knew from the data that we had an existing customer base there, with a high percentage of VIPs. Anecdotally, it was a city continuously mentioned by customers visiting our other U.S. stores,” said Hornby.

Her goal is to expand further in 2025 and she’s exploring new locations across the whole of North America. The East Coast continues to be a focus, but Hornby is also looking at locations in California and is hoping to expand further in Texas.

Marketing veteran Alice Sykes is another entrepreneur who sees great potential in the U.S. market.

She and her colleague Lucy Russell host regular lunches and selling events in the Cotswolds and the Hamptons for British designers and brands including Anna Mason, Marfa Stance, Herd, Olivia Morris at Home, Reluxe Fashion and Navygrey.

“It’s all I keep hearing — brands want to get into America,” said Sykes. “Small designers can’t be bothered with England anymore. They have to work hard to make a sale because people don’t want to spend.”

Sykes added that, in America, “the customer doesn’t think twice. I see women buying dresses two at a time — even if they don’t know the brand,” she said. “There’s more disposable income in America. In England, people are feeling poor.”

London-based designer Edeline Lee, whose fans include the Princess of Wales and Britain’s First Lady Victoria Starmer, is already doing a brisk business in U.S., with around eight retail partners in Texas alone.

“The U.S. has always been a big market for us — Americans are very open to new ideas, they’re interested in what’s happening. We’ve also spent more time there recently because the European market has become a lot more difficult since Brexit,” said Lee.

Britain Remains a Challenge

Lee pointed out that while business in U.S. may be thriving, it’s crucial for indie brands like hers to diversify.

She’s intensified the focus on her home market. After years of staging innovative presentations around town, Lee held her first runway show during London Fashion Week in September, with plans for another in February.

She’s set to have a permanent space in Harrods’ refurbished womenswear rooms and has launched a children’s clothing line, which is also selling at Harrods.

Unusually for a London-based ready-to-wear designer, Lee makes all of her clothing in England — and it’s been a boon for business.

“We have our own production unit here, and that’s made the business strong. It means I can see pieces the whole way through, and catch mistakes before they happen. It’s very grounding as a designer to be in touch with how things are being made,” she said.

None of this has been easy for Lee, who launched her label in 2014 and has been building it slowly and deliberately. A graduate of Central Saint Martins, Lee worked behind the scenes at brands including Zac Posen, Alexander McQueen and Christian Dior under John Galliano before going out on her own.

She said working for other designers taught her to keep “a sensible head. This is an industry where you can go out of business in one season because there is no end to what you can spend your money on. I saw what happened when spending went wrong, and it made me cautious. You don’t spend more than you can afford to,” she said.

Finding Solutions

Others would agree. Trino Verkade, CEO of Sarabande, the foundation set up by Lee Alexander McQueen to empower creatives in art, fashion and design, has a long history helping to run fashion companies (including McQueen) and helping creative businesses turn a profit.

She said that money has always been a big challenge for London designers so they have to think creatively about how to build their businesses.

“I tell them to focus on making the product beautiful and finding smarter ways to do business. We’re not in the same world as we were 20 years ago — things are different and more complicated,” said Verkade, adding that staff, models and suppliers need to be paid, and London is an expensive city in which to run a business.

She urges designers to take showrooms together, share communication costs, and tells them to stop trying to compete with the big French and Italian brands and “staging fashion shows for 300 people.”

Like Verkade, Sophia Neophitou has spent decades working with designers in London and internationally. A longtime stylist and creative director, she is also the founder, editor in chief and publisher of 10 Magazine.

She would also like to see more local cooperation in supply chain, purchasing and manufacturing. She lamented the loss of Hugh Devlin, the London-based lawyer and designer’s champion, who died in October. He often dispensed free advice about contracts, taxes, partnerships, potential investors and how to broker a deal.

“These designers need structure, they need a CEO [figure], someone who’s going to help them plan so they’re not living hand to mouth, because what happens with a lot of young designers is they’re just trying to meet the next payment, meet the next deadline. They’re always in constant fight or flight mode,” she said.

Neophitou said it’s not enough “to just chuck money at them. It’s about them understanding what to do with that money, how to future-proof their businesses, and allow for growth. On the creative side, these designers are amazing, but they need someone like Hugh. He left a big hole,” she said.

Although British clothing factories may be thin on the ground, and relatively expensive compared with those in China, Neophitou believes that if London’s designers and brands could club together and produce locally, it might be the start of a whole new chapter for British fashion.

The British Fashion Council continues to support new businesses and emerging talent and there are some green shoots in the form of innovative business models.

Han Chong of Self-Portrait has emerged as a champion of struggling London designers, buying and revitalizing Roland Mouret’s label, which collapsed in 2021, and setting up a new residency program based at the Self-Portrait studio and headquarters near the Barbican in East London.

Christopher Kane, who shut his eponymous brand in 2023, has become the first guest designer of Self-Portrait’s new residency program, where he created a one-off collection based on his Central Saint Martins MA graduate show.

Self-Portrait provided him with the infrastructure, resources, teams, distribution networks and creative freedom to get the job done in a relatively short span of time.

“I see this as the next chapter and putting my feet back in the water,” said Kane, who worked closely with Chong and his speedy Chinese factories on the collection, which was distributed at 40 retailers including Harvey Nichols, Mytheresa, Selfridges, Revolve, Forward, Bloomingdale’s and Club 21.