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Last Thursday, entrepreneur and influencer Grace Beverley’s London-based activewear label Tala launched its third outerwear drop on its website. An hour later, Beverley posted a screenshot to her Instagram feed: the puffer jackets, retailing up to £199, had hit £1 million in sales.
Beverley launched Tala in 2019, when she was aged 22 and making her name as a fitness influencer under the handle @GracefitUK. She had already founded online fitness platform Shreddy (where she remains CEO).
Originally launched as a licensed brand with a manufacturing partner, Tala did £6 million in sales in its first year. However, for Beverley, the real launch of the brand was April 2021, when she severed ties with the initial licenser and manufacturing partner, known for launching influencer-led labels, and struck out on her own. “I haven’t talked about this much because at the time it was sensitive,” Beverley says, speaking from a meeting room in her central London headquarters, “but having to rip it all down and start from scratch in order to build a brand with [longevity] was incredibly hard, it was incredibly expensive and incredibly tough emotionally. It required a huge amount of conviction.”
The previous partners wanted Tala to be an influencer brand, focused solely on driving sales via Beverley’s own Instagram and creating viral drops or heavily branded merchandise. Beverley was keen to invest in product innovation and build a business to last. “Being an influencer merch brand is fine and it has its value. But capping the brand’s growth at myself and my own reach, where being an influencer actually isn’t even what I want to do, wasn’t what I wanted for my future or for the brand,” she says.
Beverley already had a devoted consumer base, but without partners, she needed internal and financial support to rebuild her brand, which she was self-funding in the interim. She appointed Morgan Fowles as managing director of Tala in May 2021, to help her find investment, bolster the teams and set up a whole new manufacturing network. Previously COO of direct-to-consumer menswear label Spoke, Fowles has held product and merchandising roles across fashion, from PVH to LVMH. This year, Fowles was named CEO, while Beverley holds the founder title. The brand declined to share exact revenues, but sales were in eight figures for 2023, up 100 per cent from 2022.
Tala went into its first fundraise in 2021 with “little to no infrastructure”, Fowles says. But its consumer base was enough for investors, who saw the potential in the brand’s vision for ethically sourced activewear with mass appeal. Tala raised £4.2 million in February 2022, led by Active Ventures and Venrex. “No one had done more ethically sourced [athletic wear] anywhere near an affordable price point,” Beverley believes. “And no one wanted to because they looked at the margins and they were like, ‘Woah! We could sell it for 2.5 times the price.’”
Tala specialises in activewear and athleisure made with recycled or upcycled materials, including Tencel or organic cotton. Its offering includes its Formtech leggings, made from 75 per cent pre-consumer recycled materials, like factory offcuts. Its sculpt seamless activewear collection is made with recycled post-consumer waste such as fishing nets or plastic bottles. Pieces are priced from around £30 for tops to £199 for a full-length coat.
“Tala is one of the few brands bringing luxury and quality to the Gen Z and millennial customer at an accessible price point,” says Sasha Trower, partner at Tala investor Venrex. “The team is laser focused on the value equation of their products and I think this is one of the things that resonates so well with their audience. The sky s the limit.”
Instead of competing with premium players like Lululemon or Alo Yoga, Beverley and Fowles were keen to take on the mass market with product innovation to improve comfort and fit and design entirely with women in mind. It’s a hot segment today: from Nike and Adidas to challenger brands like Lululemon, sportswear labels have invested in women-focused design and marketing over the last year. Beverley is keen to point out that unlike a lot of major labels, Tala isn’t just made for women, but also women-run. The brand is 71 per cent women-owned, 75 per cent of board seats are held by women and 75 per cent of leadership positions are held by women. “That’s probably why we get the product so right again and again, because we will sit there and we will argue about a gusset for literally an hour.”
Following the investment, Beverley and Fowles scaled the team from nine to 40 people, bolstering every team from marketing to design. Tala went from a product roadmap of two activewear fabrics and sweats, to five recycled and upcycled activewear fabrics, a new “second-skin” athleisure line, swimwear, resort wear and outerwear. Hardly any of the pieces were heavily branded, moving away from the “merch brand” model.
Reconciling responsibility with driving consumption
When Tala started out, it was pitched as an ethical activewear label, with sustainability centred in brand communications and marketing. Fifty per cent of Tala’s customers each week are returning customers. That’s positive business-wise, but for a label that pitches itself in the ethical fashion space, that’s a lot of consumption. Tala might work with majority upcycled and recycled materials, but when you’re still pushing product, it’s hard to say you’re sustainable, Beverley concedes. “We’ve moved away from that messaging.” Tala’s responsibility page explains that it’s not a sustainable brand, but a more responsible choice than competitors in the same price bracket.
“Starting a fashion brand is not sustainable, and I will always, always own that. I will always say sustainable fashion is an oxymoron,” Beverley says. “Consumption is always at odds with sustainability. However, we know that our customers, with all the convenience in the world available to them, with all of their best intentions, are not going to stop consuming activewear. You have to create solutions at a mass market level that are better, not perfect, in order to be able to create change.” She adds that her laser focus on product, quality and fit is to ensure the garments are preferred to fast fashion equivalents.
Producing activewear sustainably is extremely difficult, because performance fabrics have always required synthetic fibres to provide adequate stretch, temperature control and sweat wicking. Like all synthetic clothing, synthetic activewear fibres shed microplastics into the water supply when washed. And, even upcycled and recycled activewear like that used by Tala, though it uses less natural resources, still emits microplastics like regular synthetic garments, which the company explains on its responsibility page.
Tala does encourage use of microplastic catching guppy bags on its social media, which customers can use to prevent fibres getting into the water supply. And Beverley notes that when Tala doesn’t have to use performance fabrics, it has used biodegradable wood pulp textile Tencel or organic cotton.
Some labels are experimenting with non-synthetic performance wear. Mara Hoffman released a swimsuit made from dissolved wood pulp last year, while last month, Sail racing league SailGP partnered with plastic-free apparel startup Mover to create technical sportswear made from 100 per cent natural fibres. However, it took two years to develop the six piece collection, which might not work for brands at scale like Tala. Tala is keen to keep experimenting with new textile options looking ahead, as they become available at scale.
Social drives scale but product comes first
Beverley doesn’t want to be categorised as an influencer brand, but social media is still a huge revenue driver for Tala, across the label’s own channels and Beverley’s accounts. The brand has also invested in performance (paid) marketing to reach new audiences this year, particularly on TikTok. Tala’s TikTok has almost 60,000 followers and over 700,000 likes.
The tone of the content across both pages is focused on how Tala products look, feel and perform. “When I talk on social media about Tala, I do it as if I’m talking to a friend. Rather than saying, new, new, new, we say, here’s a seam, here’s a cuff, this is cut this way to give comfort around the stomach,” Beverley says. “The reason we have so many things to tell them is because our market strategy starts from the solutions we provide with product.” This method aligns with the hauls and unboxings trending on TikTok, as young people do more research than ever before they purchase fashion, to better understand the product quality and fit. Beverley also avidly reads Tala reviews, social media comments and messages from the consumer base, to learn how products are received. And, she says Tala won’t rerun a product if it’s had negative reviews, without making adjustments based on feedback.
Beverley is used to taking feedback. As a prominent figure and a female entrepreneur on social media, the young founder has been met with a lot of scrutiny online. Just this week after the successful outerwear launch, the founder was criticised by one TikTok user for not tagging #ad on her posts wearing the pieces before the sale. The posts received thousands of comments and likes. Tala declined to comment on the accusations but Beverley responded to the video directly on TikTok saying she’d sought advice from regulators on this issue.
Having Fowles on hand helps Beverley weather the storms. “What I’ve been told from a lot of founders is the hardest thing is finding someone who is able to join you in the journey,” Beverley says. “We have been through hell and back and even from a very early stage together and to be able to have that and not want to kill each other is pretty impressive,” she says.
Looking ahead, Tala remains focused on its UK business, but Beverley says the brand is steadily growing in the US and Europe without any marketing spend, after the company made shipping and logistics easier this year. “I think we’re at another inflection point, based on the numbers we’re looking at,” Beverley says.
To broaden its mass market appeal, Tala launched plus sizes up to 4XL in February this year, after planning the collection for almost two years and holding several focus groups with groups of 20 plus-size women, to understand their needs. It promised that roughly three-quarters of all new styles and colours would be available in extended sizing within the following six months. The brand explained that it couldn’t launch plus sizes across 100 per cent of products just yet, as it gradually scales fits and finds new machines to make its seamless garments in bigger sizes, for example.
“Since we started the business, not having plus size has been a niggle of mine,” says Beverley. “We’d said we were providing recycled activewear to more people by taking it to the mass market, but without doing plus size, we were excluding half the population,” says Beverley. (The average size in the UK is 16, equivalent to US 12.) And, when it comes to activewear, plus-size customers have typically only had fast fashion to choose from, apart from smaller capsules by major players. Tala gradually is launching plus across its ranges to understand demand, trying to avoid overstock and testing how popular certain styles, shapes or colours are with this audience.
Tala will continue to invest in new categories and product innovations to scale the business. “Activewear is hard to get repeat purchases on because most people come to your site to buy black leggings. But, if you’re buying back into new categories like trousers or swimwear because of how good those leggings are — that’s the space we want to get into,” Beverley says. “I want people to always think of Tala and I think hopefully in the next few years, they will.”
Key takeaway: Grace Beverley first launched Tala with a licensing and manufacturing partner, which was keen to leverage her influencer status to build a social-media driven merch brand. Beverley wanted to build a more responsible activewear and athleisure business to last, focused on design innovation, so she took the leap to strike out on her own. After a challenging first year securing funding and building a team, she’s now built a label with an avenue for growth.
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