Clothsmith is our second venture in the world of interiors, having owned an award-winning interior design and staging company together for many years. We often get asked about how we met and what we did before launching Clothsmith, and in fact it was all rather serendipitous…
We were in our early 20's working as photographers for a large London estate agent. For both of us, it was our first ‘proper’ job out of university. We zipped around London in our minis, photographing multiple properties a day and gaining a real insight into how the London property market worked. We were part of a big team at the agency and met up for coffee every week (the first of many, many shared coffees!). We both realised over time that a lot of the spaces that were on the market lacked character and a sense of home. Many of them were empty and clients were greeted with bare walls and soulless spaces. Back then, property styling wasn’t really a big thing in the UK but we increasingly felt that there was a real opportunity to help homes sell faster by making them look loved and lived in. And so, despite not really knowing one another we decided to create something together and our interior design and staging business was born.
We threw everything into it in those early days. Our first storage space was Heidi’s bedroom in her shared house. We hired vans at the crack of dawn and wobbled down the front path of houses in fits of giggles under the weight of massive sofas. We loaded the vans and drove them ourselves. We went all over the country, wherever the work took us.
There were good days and bad days as we found our feet. We still have a good giggle reminiscing about the old days even now. Heidi once watched someone break into our van in broad daylight and then drive off with all our furniture in the back, all never to be seen again. Our first van was a crumbling old thing - it would only drive so far before you had to stop to let the engine cool down. We had to take it in turns to use a cloth to unscrew the radiator cap (which would just explode off!), it was so dangerous. At that time we really didn’t care, we were just two girls in our early 20’s wanting to make our way in the world. It’s so different now, a completely different challenge working on Clothsmith amongst the chaos of our busy family lives (we have 5 boys between us!) and whilst living on both sides of the pond.
When we outgrew Heidi’s room, we moved to a storage warehouse in what was at the time a rather dodgy part of East London. We then upgraded to a lockup on a farmyard in rural Essex. With no electricity, we’d unload all the furniture from that day using the headlights on the van to guide us. As you can imagine, it was all a steep learning curve.
There were the days where we would have to think outside the box to make things work. We’d (yes, just the two of us) hoist sofas and mattresses up through external windows using ropes because they wouldn’t fit through the doorways. We look back now and think ‘what were we doing?!’ but at the time we just did what we needed to do to make it work. We’ll never forget a particular project in a block of flats in Manchester. The lift was broken and our show home was on the 20th floor so we had to take everything via the stairs! We packed up the van into the early hours of the morning and were utterly exhausted when we flopped into bed late that night! We stopped at nothing to make sure the business worked.
As work picked up, so did press coverage. The BBC contacted us and asked if we would both be interested in making an interiors TV show, a bit like the Trinny and Suzannah of the interiors world and we ended up making a pilot. Let’s just say neither of us were fond of being in front of the camera and not huge fans of the cat suits they had designed for us to wear in the marketing shots either!
We won a number of awards, working nationally within the prime property market and took on lots of different projects and clients, many of whom were high profile. We gained a number of international design awards too. The support around us steadily grew, eventually needing to have full time design and installation teams. Our vision flourished and so did our creative partnership, all whilst Polly navigated early motherhood and Heidi found love in New York.
Working together on our first business was exhausting and thrilling in equal measure and we learnt so much about ourselves, forging such a strong friendship along the way too. We would often joke that it was like being married to one another, we just got to know each other so well.
With all that experience behind us and knowing that we make a pretty good team, we wanted to continue working together in a different capacity, even though we’re now on different sides of the Atlantic. The establishment of Clothsmith is a new chapter of our journey together. This time round it’s focused on what we love most about interiors. By creating space for our creative partnership once more, it allows us to feel inspired again. It’s really exciting to be able to turn our passion of creating a sense of home into something tangible.
