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Laura Ashley Lifestyles
| Article
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13462 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
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9 / 1987 |
2,450 Words |
| Author
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Rosemary G. Rennicke
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If a marketing team were to conjure a fictitious figurehead for a company peddling countrified English Victorian clothes and furnishings, it no doubt would choose a gentlewoman of culture and taste; someone who is devoted to home and family, loves literature and the arts, prefers country comforts to city chaos, is at ease whether mucking in the garden, taking tea in the conservatory or traveling on the Continent. Someone very much like the late Laura Ashley herself, whose extensive line of nostalgic clothing and interior décor products have made quality design available and affordable to everyone from Adelaide to Zurich. Even her name rings true - old-fashioned, lyrical, veddy British.
The Laura Ashley name adorns some three hundred chic shops worldwide and has become synonymous with a look as elegant, romantic, and graceful as the grand old English country-house life that inspired it. But it is only a quirk of fate, or perhaps pride in partnership, that Laura's name was attached to anything more than a striking Welshwoman with a keen eye. Husband Bernard Ashley, a financial clerk with engineering sense and entrepreneurial vision, began silk-screening abstract textile designs in the couple's London apartment kitchen in 1953. Laura, too, learned how to hand print napkins and tea towels, but in patterns much more traditional than Bernard's. When it came time to sell Laura's dainty Victorian linens, her husband insisted it would be more appropriate to sell them under her own aegis. So Laura Ashley Ltd. was born.
Over the next three years, the small printing presses Bernard had devised for his own textiles became fully engaged with his wife's country prints. Tea towels decorated with images from old English posters were a particular hit with customers at Harrods, Heal's, and several American department stores. The growing Ashley business and family - two babies had since joined the household - relocated to an old coach house on a riverside in Kent.
Idyllic and spacious as their new homestead-cum-factory was, the storm-swollen river nearby almost drowned the Ashleys' dream when it flooded the premises and ruined their equipment and materials. It took another few years for the fledgling company to get on solid ground again and add aprons, potholders, and scarves to the line.
Though the company was changing rapidly in these early years, one aspect was established from day one. Practical and intuitive, the Ashleys set the guidelines for the enterprise: style, quality, and reasonable prices. This value-for-money philosophy governed the vertical direction in which the company was to develop. To keep costs down and quality up, the Ashleys sought to control every facet of the business. So when the climate was ripe to turn out the first article of clothing, the company was already halfway there with is own small design, printing, finishing, cutting, and sewing facilities and one-man sales department. The fleet of delivery trucks and international network of factories, warehouses and retail stores would follow in time.
From kitchen linens to clothing
The step from kitchen linens to clothing took Laura Ashley Ltd. to Wales and Laura back to her homeland in 1961. As southeastern England was already too crowded to accommodate a growing factory, the family settled in a village in Wales' hilly, sparsely populated
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