When Mireia Llusia-Lindh launched handbag label DeMellier in 2017, she wasn’t trying to disrupt luxury so much as rebalance it. The former consultant and Harvard Business School graduate saw an industry where price and value were drifting apart, so set out to build a handbag brand rooted in accessibility. Almost a decade on, that positioning is resonating with a new generation of discerning luxury shoppers. DeMellier is scaling fast, building serious sales momentum ahead of opening its first flagship in London’s Sloane Square later this year.
DeMellier sales grew over 60% last year, and the brand is targeting around 50% growth in 2026, though it declined to share revenues. The bags — seen on Catherine, Princess of Wales, Emily Ratajkowski, Reese Witherspoon, Katie Holmes and more — retail from £265 for a basket bag and £395 for a mini shoulder bag, to £525 for a leather tote bag and £625 for a croc-effect tote.
“Today’s customer is very savvy,” says DeMellier founder and director Llusia-Lindh at the brand’s studio in Hammersmith, West London. “New luxury, to me, is about values and integrity, and that also extends to pricing.”
Its momentum reflects a broader shift in the market. As top luxury brands raise prices and remove entry-level offerings, accessible luxury brands like DeMellier are grabbing market share. According to research from management consultancy Bain Company, the accessible luxury segment outperformed the wider luxury market in 2025, with 50% of brands in this category growing, compared to 35% of ultra-luxury brands (the likes of Loro Piana and Hermès) and 25% of classic luxury labels (such as Louis Vuitton and Gucci).
Vogue commerce director Naomi Smart, who leads Vogue Shopping at British Vogue, says DeMellier is one of the platform’s “new growth brands”. “We’ve noticed an uptick in popularity,” she says. “DeMellier’s sleeker designs with cleaner silhouettes are ideal for professional life, and combined with that sweet-spot price point, I think has led to conversion.”
The DeMellier customer ranges from 18 to 65 years old, but its core client is a woman aged 35 to 55, who is educated, well-traveled and drawn to niche brands rather than logos. Some are luxury clients trading down from the £3,000-plus price points of major houses; others are aspirational shoppers saving for their first investment piece, Llusia-Lindh says. Roughly three-quarters of sales are split across the UK, the US and Europe, with the Middle East growing “very fast” as well as early traction in Japan and South Korea.
Building without the luxury playbook
Llusia-Lindh has a background in business strategy rather than design. Raised in Spain, the founder moved to London to join consultancy Bain Company before completing an MBA at Harvard Business School and launched her first handbag brand, Milli Millu, in 2010, which rebranded to DeMellier in 2017. “[As a consultant] I saw the industry from the outside, and felt there were a lot of compromises and shortcuts. I felt the bags were overpriced for the quality, and there was a monopoly in terms of who had access to the industry,” she says.
She set herself the task of designing modern bags at attainable prices, with three values at the heart: putting women at the forefront (from product design, functionality and marketing campaigns to addressing gender inequalities in factories and executive leadership); transparent, ethical and sustainable production standards; and giving back to children’s charities through the brand’s A Bag, A Life program, which has now funded more than two million medical treatments and lifesaving vaccines (for every bag purchased, DeMellier funds treatments for orphans in economically disadvantaged countries, in collaboration with international charity SOS Children’s Villages and local vaccine providers).
Llusia-Lindh is reluctant to oversimplify the reality of growing a business. “What I want to convey is that it’s not about one thing or some magic formula. It’s a combination of things — that’s why we’re succeeding,” she says.
But despite its current performance, DeMellier was not an overnight success. “It took me a good five or six years to figure out how the industry works. I had no contacts in the press, I wasn’t the former design director of some big brand, I wasn’t married to a celebrity or a celebrity myself,” she says. “The main thing I learned was that it takes time to build a brand, from the images to your website to your packaging. It wasn’t bad in the beginning, but I needed to level up the aesthetic and how we communicated the brand.”
DeMellier began as a direct-to-consumer (DTC) business before expanding into wholesale for spring 2018. Wholesale now accounts for 15% of the business — with key partners including Net-a-Porter and Selfridges — while DTC accounts for the remainder. “[DTC] was a need in the beginning, because I didn’t have connections. But the lesson has been that owning the relationship with the customer is priceless,” says Llusia-Lindh. “You have feedback from your customers who email you day-in, day-out, and you know exactly what product is performing and why.” That information has guided DeMellier’s expansion in both wholesale and DTC, as well as its upcoming London flagship launch.
Crucially, the company has resisted raising prices as demand increased. “Being a luxury brand with attainable prices has worked in our favor, because there have been a lot of brands tempted to increase prices when they start succeeding,” says Llusia-Lindh. “But we stayed true to all our values, including pricing with integrity.”
Testing the product, scaling the business
While DeMellier is part of a growing class of accessible luxury handbag brands, what differentiates it is a conscious decision not to develop a singular It-bag, the way most competitors have. “The way we differentiate is with product design. A lot of [our competitors] launched with an It-bag, whereas we’re constantly innovating so we’re not reliant on one silhouette for growth,” Llusia-Lindh says. While growth has been more gradual, she indicates that it’s healthy and sustainable.
The product mix is based on a variation of sales data and instincts, she continues. DeMellier has an in-house group of six (including Llusia-Lindh and representatives from marketing, commercial, and merchandising) who give feedback on each bag that the design team develops. After that, members of the wider team test out the bag, usually for a week at a time, and give feedback on functionality and comfort. When I visit the studio, Llusia-Lindh proudly shows me that every large tote fits a laptop and has a shoulder strap. If there’s consensus around a certain style, the design team builds a full family around it, creating mini, mid-size and large variations in different colorways.
Llusia-Lindh attributes the success of this testing strategy to internal diversity: DeMellier’s 73-person team represents 24 different nationalities across a range of ages, which directly translates into understanding a range of consumers. “I can never comprehend when companies have a bias against people based on their gender, ethnicity, background, or country of origin. A great part of our performance is the diversity we have,” she says. “There’s a wealth of knowledge and experience you cannot get if everyone is from the same place.”
Long-term relationships with partner factories in Italy and Spain allow for the product mix to be more flexible. “When I was starting we had to do a lot of convincing,” Llusia-Lindh says. “But now that we’ve reached a certain size and have very well-established relationships with suppliers, they’re open to creating a few less or more, because it’s treated as a partnership.”
That same long-term thinking is applied to service: the brand offers free repairs for the first year, and lifetime repairs thereafter, at a cost dependent on the repair. “I always say, I want everything to feel luxury except the price point — the design, the quality, the product, the packaging, the experience, and the customer service,” Llusia-Lindh says.
That balance will be tested as the company grows. Geopolitical uncertainty, tariffs and wavering consumer confidence are the chief concerns. Yet, the same pressures creating volatility for big houses are fueling interest in alternatives, and DeMellier is betting on that. “We want to be a positive force in the industry and make sure our values are resonating,” Llusia-Lindh says. “It’s not just about selling pretty bags, but about doing it with integrity.”
This article has been updated to reflect DeMellier’s rebrand from Milli Millu in 2017. (2/18/26)
