Nadine Merabi: why scaling up 800% nearly broke her fashion brand

Nadine Merabi used to play hockey professionally for England. Today, her fashion brand, Nadine Merabi, has sales of over $50m (£37.8m) a year. Her designs have been worn on red carpets at Cannes, the BAFTAs and the National Television Awards. She explains to Sir Richard Harpin, on the Business Leader podcast, the resilience it takes to build a business from scratch.

In our interview, you will learn about:

• Why growing 800 per cent in a single year was her biggest mistake
• How a competitor helped to get her production line off the ground
• The moment she realised she needed a board, and how she went about building one
• Why she turned down wholesale deals from Nordstrom and Selfridges

How Nadine Merabi swapped hockey stick for sewing needle

Merabi played hockey for England as a teenager, an experience she credits with teaching her discipline long before she ever picked up a sewing needle. “When you are playing any sport at a high level, you have to be super disciplined,” she says. “You need to learn how to face setbacks as well.”

Her father died just as she was starting university and she left after a single year, unsure of what she wanted to do. “I was a bit lost, I'll be honest with you,” she says. The decade that followed took in international hockey, a spell as a ski instructor and several years running club nights in Manchester before fashion entered the picture almost by accident. She began altering her clothes to save money.

The turning point came at 29. “I don't want to be a 30-year-old party girl,” she remembers thinking. “The next day I literally just quit my job. I bought a sewing machine from Argos. I went home and I was like, ‘I don't know how to sew’.”

With no patterns and no formal training, she taught herself from online tutorials, freehand cutting her first designs on her bedroom floor.

How Nadine Merabi got to Selfridges

Six months after she started making dresses, an email arrived from Selfridges' head office asking her to bring in her “collection”, a word that gave her pause. “I was thinking, collection? I don't have a collection. I've got some dresses on a rail.” She went anyway, suitcase in hand.

The buyers placed a substantial order on the spot. “Right, Nadine. We'll take 80 of these, 110 of these, 60 of these. When can you deliver them?” she recalls them saying. “I literally just cut out freehand. I didn't even have patterns. I didn't even know how to buy a roll of fabric at this point.” She quoted 60 days and got to work, unpicking her own freehand dresses to reverse-engineer patterns.

She turned to Vicky Martin, a fellow Manchester designer she considered a competitor, who offered factory capacity and fabric supplier introductions. “Just because you're in competition with someone doesn't mean you can't help each other either,” Merabi says of the lesson. With no savings to fund the stock, she took the order to her bank and secured a £10,000 loan to make it happen, delivering on time.

In the business's early years, Merabi ran every function herself, including customer service. “When people used to call the client care team, I would answer the phone and go, ‘Hello, Anna speaking,'” she says. "[I thought] I can't just say it's Nadine. That's going to look like it's not a good company.”

She describes the period as gruelling but formative: “I got to understand every part of the business. I got to understand what was needed from each element from the ground up.”

Merabi was seven months pregnant with her first child, running an 18-person occasion-wear business, when the pandemic cancelled every event overnight. “I wrote a lot of lists,” she says of the early weeks.

With red-carpet gowns suddenly unsellable, she pivoted into silk satin pyjamas with feather trims, which customers wore out with heels. The line, later spotted on Kate Moss and Rita Ora, still accounted for 10 per cent of sales two years after launch.

With no marketing budget in the early days, Merabi relied on gifting product to influencers rather than paying fees. “I'm really sorry, we don't have a budget for that,” she would tell them.

Within months, most came back wanting a dress to wear to their own events. “I'll help you out and you help me out. So it worked hand in hand,” she says.

The 800 per cent mistake that nearly broke Nadine Merabi

Asked about her biggest mistake, Merabi doesn't hesitate: a single year of 800 per cent growth. “It was chaos. Absolute chaos. And I really regret that happening,” she says.

Staff numbers tripled from 30 to 100 in a year with no formal onboarding process, customer replies slipped to three days, and the culture buckled under the strain. “The culture was really affected and it made me really quickly realise how important culture was in a business", Merabi recalls.

Around 30 of those hires didn't work out, and untangling the fallout took the best part of a year. “I remember at the end of the year in January when we sat down to set our goals, they were like, ‘Right, what's your growth goals?' And I was like, ‘I actually don't want to grow. I can't, this is not manageable,'” she says. It was only after this reckoning that the business built its first proper leadership team.

Retailers had been approaching Merabi for wholesale deals for years before she said yes. “We weren't ahead of the critical path where we needed to be,” she says. “The thing with strategic retail partners is if you mess up, that's it. You just can't mess up.” The business waited until it could guarantee stock quality before agreeing terms with Selfridges in the UK and Nordstrom and Revolve in the US.

The US has always been strong for the brand, drawn to its “flamboyance”, and the company now runs separate UK, US and EU warehouses to manage tariffs and shipping. A year-long pop-up in Soho, New York, run with a local retail partner, proved the model for a future flagship store — plans paused when new US tariffs landed just before a lease was due to be signed. A London flagship on South Molton Street is already profitable, and Paris is next on the roadmap following a recent EU website launch.

How Nadine Merabi found its board at 10 years old

For the first six years there was no management team, just Merabi and “a small group of multitaskers”. Only more recently has she brought in specialists, including chairman Nick Bon, formerly of ASOS, and advisor Hash Lad, the former Jigsaw chief executive.

“The first thing Nick said to me when I didn't even know him. ‘What can I do to help you? I'm not going to be your CEO’,” she recalls. The relationship started as mentorship and has since evolved into a formal board, now being joined by a first female chief executive.

Merabi is candid that the CEO role was never her ambition. “I've never been the CEO and I don't want to be the CEO. It's not my passion. It's not my drive. My passion and drive is the design side of it,” she says. “I know I can hire someone better than me to do the CEO role. I don't know if I can hire someone better than me to understand how women feel and what their insecurities are when they're dressing.”

Nadine Merabi's four lessons for leaders

Know your purpose, then prioritise it. “Purpose without priority is pointless,” she says. Once a founder is clear on why the business exists, ruthlessly prioritising time is what stops it from tipping into chaos.

Treat every mistake as an opportunity. “A problem isn't a problem. A problem is an opportunity,” she says of the setbacks along the way, including the 800 per cent growth year that nearly broke the business.

Hire for what you're not good at. Merabi has never wanted to run her own company day-to-day. “I know I can hire someone better than me to do the CEO role,” she says, while keeping design as her focus.

Plan for profit once you've earned the right to slow down. Her mantra has shifted from “pressure makes diamonds” in the grit-and-grind early years to “planning makes profit” now that the business is established.

You can hear the full conversation with Nadine Merabi on the Business Leader podcast.