INTERV I EW
WORDS BY NICOLA FOLEY
JULIE DEANE LOOKS BACK ON THE CAMBRIDGE SATCHEL COMPANY’S SUCCESSFUL JOURNEY, FROM HER KITCHEN TABLE TO THE RUNWAY
he story of Cambridge Satchel Company is the stuff of Hollywood film plots. Beginning with a worried mum needing to
raise some extra cash, and ending with a multimillion-pound, world-famous fashion brand, it’s a bootstrapping story of grit, good fortune – and a really great product. For small businesses, it’s an inspiring example of how right things can go with hard work and fair winds, but it’s even impressed the world’s biggest and most successful companies. Just ask Google, which retold Cambridge Satchel’s origin story in a 2012 advertising campaign for the Chrome browser. It all started in 2008 at a kitchen table in Cambridge. Julie Deane needed to make money to move her daughter out of her current school, where she was being bullied, into a fee-paying school nearby. Armed with £600 and a list of business ideas, she pondered her options, eventually deciding to take a chance on traditional leather satchels – the kind she remembered fondly from her schooldays. She found a leather supplier, coded a basic web shop and sales started trickling through. The business looked promising enough. Then, two things happened that dramatically changed the company’s trajectory. First, the bags started getting picked up by celebrities and the fashion blogging elite – giving them cult status in the blink of an eye – and second, they were featured in The Guardian ’s Christmas gift guide. Julie remembers this as the real ‘pinch me’ moment. “The bag had gone in to be photographed way in advance, and we’d
Times , Urban Outfitters and other high-street shops were added to the list of stockists, and fashion houses – including Erdem, Vivienne Westwood and Comme des Garçons – were knocking on Julie’s door, pleading to work with her. The whole thing played out like a marketing dream. Julie harnessed the power of influencers (way before it was the norm), and managed to become the toast of the fashion world within a few short months – all on a shoestring budget. And yet, she insists that suggesting she had any kind of clever strategy would be generous. “More than generous, in fact. I literally learnt everything from googling stuff!” she exclaims. “Really early on, I googled ‘how do you write a press release?’ and
sort of forgotten about it. We were just plodding on and trying to figure out how we could cut and paste a Christmas tree picture on to our website’s homepage,” she laughs. “At the time, my phone would get an alert letting me know there’d been a purchase on the website – and it was just going mad: ping, ping, ping!” At first, Julie assumed there was a technical glitch causing a single order to churn around, but when she checked the back end of the website, she was stunned at what she saw: reams and reams of fresh orders as far as the eye could see. It was, she says, “just beyond exciting”. From there, it wasn’t long before Cambridge Satchels were being heralded as the “British ‘It’ bag” by The New York
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