Dessi Bell, the co-founder of £30M-a-year fashion business, Saint and Sofia

Kids are rarely praised for being a career-booster. That pram in the hallway that’s said to be the enemy of good art has crushed a fair few entrepreneurs in its time too. 

 Not Dessi Bell, co-founder of £30m-a-year fashion business Saint and Sofia. She worked in banking at JPMorgan before launching a fitness brand, Zaggora, which sold over 1.5 million pairs of its flagship HotPants. Then she and her husband and co-founder, Malcolm, had children. “It prompted a rethink ,” Bell explains. “I credit that with both starting Saint and Sofia and making us much more considerate as managers and people.”

 At the time, “luxury European fashion was going through significant price inflation, whilst other brands were talking about fairness, transparency and sustainability. We thought: surely there can be a way to combine the two.”

 And so the Bells launched sustainable stylish fashion brand Saint and Sofia in January 2020. Demand was immediate – after a quick pivot towards lockdown-friendly ‘Zoom tops’. First-year sales hit £7.5 million.

 “There was no ‘big bang’ launch,” Bell says, “we’ve built the business one customer at a time,  gradually optimising our offering by both measuring Key Performance Indicators and our gut.” They launched without funding, and have never taken on investment: “by focusing on making money on every sale, and monitoring customer acquisition costs, we didn’t need to.”

 “My advice for founders is to heavily research the metrics driving success in your sector, and focus on those from day one. In our direct-to-consumer business, customer retention is a big driver of growth and profitability, so we focused on this from the beginning.” 

 Still only four years old, Saint and Sophia has 500,000 customers (almost 50% of sales are now international, led by the US) and 70 staff,  it has a bricks-and-mortar store, in London’s Covent Garden, and an annual run rate of £30 million. 

How did the brand – whose fans include  TV presenter Amanda Holden and singer Natalie Imbruglia – scale so fast and so successfully? “We were both outsiders to the fashion industry – that’s been an advantage, allowing us to take a fairly impartial, problem-solving approach to how we want to serve our customers and structure our business. 

 “But scaling has been difficult. There’s something magical about the early days when everyone pitches in, celebrates small wins, and the team is tight-knit. As we grow, maintaining that day-one energy is essential. For us, it’s all about keeping an inclusive, proactive culture. 

 “We hire people who are resourceful, take ownership, and understand the impact of their work. We make a conscious effort to maintain a flat structure and a transparent environment where everyone feels a part of something special.”

 The Bells’ kids now provide an extra impetus to grow their business. “Children are a really undervalued management tool – becoming a parent makes you more organised, and able to negotiate with difficult people,” Bell says.

 So when I ask if they have an exit plan, it’s a firm ‘no’. “We are building our business for the long run. We would love it if our children one day would like to join in.”

Read more about Saint and Sofia via their website and read more of our scaleup stories here.

Malcolm Bell and Dessi Bell, founders of Saint and Sofia