When Charlotte Simone Beecham launched her coat brand 10 years ago, she went by the book. Seventy per cent wholesale, the rest direct-to-consumer (DTC); four collections a year; big retail partnerships including Saks, Harvey Nichols and Matches. Her big, ’70s-style fluffy Penny Lane coats were a hit, and the brand was growing steadily.
Then, Covid hit, and her business was, as Beecham puts it, “basically lost overnight”. In her Marylebone studio, surrounded by samples and not much else, Beecham took to Instagram. She started posting these one-off samples on her Instagram Story, and slowly but surely they gained traction.
That’s when Beecham pivoted to the drop model she now operates on. Two collections a year (winter one in September; winter two in November), available to shop for one week each, plus one archive sample drop of various silhouettes and fabrications, as well as surplus stock. The next archive drop starts Wednesday, 26 March. “It was from there that I decided to pause what I was doing and focus on the Charlotte Simone community; to work in a slower, more considered, more creative, more sustainable way to make product — which hopefully is worth waiting for and feels a bit more special,” she tells me.
Five years on, shoppers are ready and waiting. The brand’s last drop in November 2024 went live at 8pm. At 8.07pm, there were around 12,000 people on the website. It’s the most they’ve seen so far. It’s no wonder that in January, Charlotte Simone claimed a spot on the Lyst Index for the first time; a Charlotte Simone coat was the ranking’s eighth hottest product. It’s thanks, in part, to a celebrity boost: Taylor Swift helped to drive a 242 per cent surge in searches for the British designer’s coats, according to Lyst. But Swift aside, Charlotte Simone site traffic on launch night has increased by over 45 per cent year-on-year, and launch-night sales by 125 per cent.
Beecham may have been paying homage to the Penny coat since the beginning, but the style is also having a moment. Long curly fur, typically placed on collars, cuffs and around openings, is expected to increase 15 per cent in the first quarter of 2025, according to Heuritech, a trend forecasting platform that uses image recognition on Instagram to identify fashion trends as they bubble up.
A decade in, Beecham’s brand trajectory is split into two phases: pre and post-pandemic. For the first five years, she operated at the behest of the fashion industry. For the last five, she’s worked on her own terms. It’s a pivot many designers muse, but few embark on. Beecham breaks down how she did it.
New ways of working
Beecham herself never expected to stray from fashion’s rigorous schedule. “When you’re on the hamster wheel, it moves so quickly,” she says. “You’re just going and going and going. And we were designing and then selling and then going again — designing, selling, designing, selling.”
A forced break drove Beecham to realise the pace wasn’t working. “I feel like I was burnt to a crisp,” she says, looking back. With the twice-yearly drop model, Beecham is able to take the nine to 10 months she needs to design and develop each collection with her five-person team, each made up of 12 to 14 pieces.
She sustains this with the once-yearly archive drop, happening Wednesday. During the design process, Beecham samples many silhouettes and fabrications. “Instead of sending those to be destroyed or I don’t know what, it’s a way that we can sustain this kind of business model. By having people support and buy our samples,” Beecham explains. Wednesday’s drop has over 160 pieces (far more than the typical 12 to 14-piece drops), many of which are one-of-one. She calls it a treasure trove: shoppers are invited to dig through, not knowing what they’ll get. “Tune in at 8pm and you’ll see anything from tiger print to sherbert yellow.”
In shifting to this model, Beecham has also freed up time to engage more closely with her consumers. She’s the one replying to those who DM the account. “It allows me to keep my finger on the pulse,” she says. “I know if someone’s complaining or if something’s not working or a shape or a fabric is wrong. I’m the first person to know.”
I joke that it’s like another full-time job. She agrees but seems unfazed. It is, after all, these engagements that help to inform the content of forthcoming collections. “I’m always asking: OK, so we had leopard print last year. Do you want leopard again? Do you want it in wool? Do you want it in faux fur?”
This is one of the biggest changes Beecham has enjoyed since shifting her business model. She recalls pre-Covid when she’d have to cave to wholesaler requests. “A big retailer made me make an orange coat,” she remembers, grimacing. The coats didn’t sell (the trend came and went). The retailer shipped back the coats — no payment. And Beecham was left with a pile of orange coats that were never for her customer in the first place. “It’s a situation that I luckily don’t need to find myself in any more,” she says.
These days, more than ever, Instagram is Charlotte Simone’s brand hub. Eighty per cent of the brand’s sales come from the platform. With no year-round website or physical storefront, Instagram is where the brand world lives. “We have no storefront and our website is closed apart from three weeks of the year,” the designer says. “So Instagram is essentially everything. It’s our world for our customer.” It’s for this reason that she sits at the helm — of the account as well as the brand.
The right price
It also keeps Beecham abreast of what consumers are willing — and able — to pay. “When we are in design and development, we always think to ourselves that we want [the coats] to be attainable,” she says. “It’s still luxury, but it should be attainable.”
Beecham always asks herself what she’d be comfortable spending on a jacket. “That’s why we use a lot of faux fabrications as well,” she explains. “It allows us to bring that price bracket down and for it to feel more achievable.”
As luxury prices continue to climb, it’s a notable feat. In Q4, the average price for Lyst’s hottest products (the list on which Charlotte Simone placed eighth) was $628 — a 27 per cent decline year-on-year. Charlotte Simone’s pieces, averaging at £385, fall well below this average.
It’s a sign of where consumers are at: they’re pulling back and spending less, squeezed by both high costs of living and the skyrocketing luxury prices they feel no longer match the quality of the product. So for Charlotte Simone, sitting on the lower end of this bracket is a sort of safety net. This, coupled with the designer’s close contact with her consumers, positions the brand better than many.
Up next
The price point may be accessible, but even those who could pay tenfold are opting for Charlotte Simone.
Swift, for one. “Taylor Swift was, without a doubt, the biggest moment for my brand to date,” Beecham says. “She’s worn Charlotte Simone three times now and each time it feels bigger and better.” The last time Swift wore a coat (last month, to a pre-Super Bowl dinner in New Orleans), site traffic shot up 500 per cent. The brand saw almost 10,000 sign-ups to its mailing list in five working days, and gained between 8,000 to 10,000 followers on Instagram (virtually based in the US, the brand’s fastest-growing market). Other brand fans include Charli XCX, Dua Lipa and Madonna. “If we get a celebrity hit, that day, we’ll see an increase in site traffic,” Beecham says.
The buzz may be growing, but the designer is intent on going steady. “We’ve had the model for five years now, but we have not added another drop,” she says. “We’ve been slow and incremental with perhaps adding an additional piece here and there, but are really wanting to stay true to the business model and produce things that feel considered in limited quantities — I’d rather have them sell out than be sitting on stock.”
While Beecham won’t be adding volumes, she is interested in expanding Charlotte Simone’s repertoire. Though the brand is loved for its ’70s-inspired look, the designer is cognisant that she can grow the brand by expanding beyond its signature style. One of the latest drops had a pleather jacket called Frankie, which sold out within the first hour. (It was also the style worn by Gigi Hadid at Paris Fashion Week.) “That, for me, was a really exciting signal that there’s demand for this new category of pleather aviator jackets,” Beecham says. “It’s not something we’ve really gone for; I was really tentative as to whether our consumer would be receptive to it. But the response was pretty huge, and we got an extensive wait list.”
From there, Beecham is looking to new coat categories. “There’s still a lot of uncharted territory for us to explore,” she says. “That, for me, is a green flag to really push that as a category and allow also a VIP customer, or someone that perhaps has one or two Charlotte Simone coats, to be offered something different.”
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