24 Miss Milly staple is the hinged resin bangle, a really simple but effective piece that we have offered in at least 100 different Pantone shades over the years. As soon as we think sales are slowing down and reduce the colours on offer for the following season to six from 10, we have to revamp the planned restock and add more! And the third design that immediately comes to mind is our layered necklace with matching earrings and hinged bangle. This is my favourite piece for creating adventurous colour combinations, and we’ve had some gorgeous ones over the years. We started with tonal blues and greys, and quickly moved to mixes of three colours, and now, they’re veritable rainbows. The design for SS25 is definitely one of my favourites to date for its vibrancy and use of all the key colours of the season. Have any styles taken you by surprise with their popularity? Definitely. We’re a lot more confident with our selection process now but still sometimes get taken by surprise. Our hand-painted disc necklace and earrings use bands of metal that are intertwined giving a woven appearance. We thought it was an attractive design, but the sales really did take us by surprise and after introducing it in 2021, it is still going strong. This is another piece where we can play with colour. We felt the AW24 orange and gold version was a brave move and weren’t sure of how popular it would be, but the first run sold out really quickly. The SS25 iteration is a mix of navy, coral and peach, and we’re sure will be even more popular. How do you keep your designs fresh and current? Do you follow trends? Every season we launch a mix of brand-new designs alongside new colours in popular pieces. I create a seasonal colour palette from looking at upcoming trends but also taking into account the colours I know our customers and end consumers love. It would be unthinkable to do a Spring/Summer season without turquoise and some lime green, likewise, an Autumn/Winter without any royal blue. Whilst the direction of fashion is very important, and green has strongly proven this over the past couple of years, our key customer is aged 35-65 and also knows what they like and what suits them. Miss Milly is not a fashion-forward brand, we are more about classic pieces that endure, but we do work hard to keep each season fresh and are often complimented on how much is new within the collections. What sets you apart from your competitors? I have a Post-It note in my office with the four words that made up the Miss Milly essence when I did a bit of brand work at the start of COVID. They came easily to mind as it is how I’d set up and run the business from the start but without formally putting it down on paper. Colourful, happy, honest, helpful. I won’t go into each of them separately, although colourful is pretty obvious, but they are intrinsic in how we create and price our products and work with our customers and suppliers. There is no point in enduring the stress and long hours of working for yourself if you don’t enjoy it. Even in the hardest of times you have to find some positives. During the lockdowns I focused on keeping in touch with customers, for my sanity as much as ensuring I had a business at the end of it. Firstly, despite having committed to restocks, we didn’t hold anybody to their Spring Fair orders and finally cleared the last of that stock in early 2024, and then as we approached re-opening, I set up a series of Zoom roundtables where retailers could come together and discuss how they were going to do this and share suppliers for PPE, etc. Things go wrong, that’s unescapable, but it’s how you deal with it that counts and if we make a mistake, we’ll hold up our hands, admit it and then work to resolve it. At the end of the day, selling accessories isn’t life or death, even if sometimes it feels like it. I think it is this depth of brand feeling and behaviour that makes us
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