A diagnosis of breast cancer is devastating for any woman, but for Cath Kidston it must have been doubly painful. Not only was the entrepreneur just 37, but her own mother had died from the disease.
Yet were it not for her illness, it is unlikely Kidston would have gone on to head an empire with annual sales of £129 million, selling everything from curtains to wellies and dog baskets.
By her own admission, the disease gave her the guts to abandon the interior design business that helped to pay her bills and focus on the fledgling company she had founded two years earlier.
‘It made me think, “OK, I’m just going to concentrate on the stores. If I go broke, then I go broke,” ’ she later said. And the risk paid off, leading to a global empire straddling 14 countries.
Cath Kidston (pictured) is set to close all 60 of her UK stores, including the Piccadilly flagship
But today her fears have come true and the company is broke.
More than 900 staff face redundancy and the brand will be put into administration before reopening as a smaller business, trading only online and abroad.
You will still be able to buy its products online but all 60 UK stores, including the Piccadilly flagship, will close their doors for good.
It’s a sad decline for a company that was once the ultimate must-have for Britain’s middle class.
A printed ironing board cover was her first success, making her realise the value of producing beautiful but functional products evocative of a more domesticated Fifties era but in a glossy, aspirational way.
Her faded floral prints and cheery patterns encapsulated the mood of the Nineties and Noughties boom years when, as she recalled, ‘people were moving from formal dining-room life into their kitchens’ and her irreverent chintz ‘felt right for the moment’.
City career women longing for a little rural chic outfitted whole kitchens in Cath Kidston, with each new addition to the range in hot demand.
Her shops started opening around Britain, with the first overseas store in Tokyo in 2006. By the late Noughties her brand was offering tea towels, umbrellas, biscuit tins, baby clothes and more. Her beloved canine Stanley was company mascot.
Kidston admitted her retro style elicited a ‘Marmite reaction’. Yet she insisted the brand was ‘not about high fashion’.
Cath, 61, (pictured) who grew up in Hampshire, started an interior-design business at age 25, before opening her Cath Kidston shop in 1993
So how did this softly spoken 61-year-old capture a middle-class Zeitgeist for nearly 30 years — and what went wrong?
The daughter of a shipping company chairman and a cousin of TV presenter Kirstie Allsopp, Kidston grew up in a Georgian house in Hampshire with a swimming pool and was educated at the prestigious West Heath school in Kent, the year above Princess Diana — but it was tragedy, rather than privilege, that fuelled her ambition.
When she was 18, her father died suddenly. The loss had a ‘marked effect’ on Kidston, who was dyslexic and, by her own admission, not academic. ‘My dad admired people with imagination, so I wanted to please him… I wanted to be able to think he would have been proud of me.’
She was also keen to avoid the ‘housewife trap’ her mother had fallen into. ‘She was entirely dependent,’ says Kidston.
Soon afterwards, she was hired by interior designer Nicky Haslam. ‘He allowed me lots of responsibility, which I thought was pretty cool considering I was totally untried and untested and probably an airhead,’ said Kidston.
It was through this job that she met her husband, record producer Hugh Padgham, while measuring his curtains.
At 25, she started an interior-design business with a friend, after which she opened her first Cath Kidston shop in Holland Park, West London, in 1993, with £15,000.
Cath revealed her aim was to sell items that were inspired by her childhood home. Pictured: Cath Kidston wellington boots
The idea was to sell items inspired by her childhood home. The reality, Kidston described as a ‘glorified junk shop’.
Then, in 1995, came the breast cancer diagnosis and another crushing setback: she was unable to have children. She channelled the shock into her work.
‘I do think that out of most painful things, good things can come. And I don’t know if I’d have achieved the focus of the business, and the commitment, if I’d had children.’
The brand went from strength to strength, and in 2010 she sold a majority stake to U.S. private equity group TA Associated, pocketing an estimated £25 million and retaining a minority stake which it is thought she still holds.
By 2013 annual turnover exceeded £100 million and there were 33 stores in Japan, where Kidston had become so famous that she travelled under the alias Barbara Windsor.
A further shift in focus to Asia came as the brand was sold to Baring Private Equity Asia in 2016. By then, two thirds of the stores were outside Britain and Cath stepped down as creative director.
In 2018 the brand reported its first major losses, with experts pointing to high rents and the rise of online shopping. Brexit uncertainty was said to have played a role. But it may also be that the niche appeal of its spotty tea towels had started to feel dated.
Cath Kidston (pictured) is said to be working on a secretive new design project
And this week Cath Kidston joined Laura Ashley and Debenhams as a casualty of the Covid-19 crisis. For Cath herself, the news must be distressing.
Today her life is very different from when she ran a global brand. She and Padgham finally married in 2012 at Hounslow Register Office, near their Chiswick home — their nuptials long delayed because of Kidston’s fear of ‘everyone staring’.
Resolutely uninterested in many of the trappings of wealth, she later said: ‘We spent £187 on the wedding. It was great. I wore an old cotton dress with embroidery and a Cath Kidston bag for luck.’
She has also been dismissive about the domesticity her brand evokes. In 2013 she said she’d never wanted to be ‘that housewife’ and had ‘a modern, white Skandium kitchen with sliding glass doors’.
She played down the resulting fuss: ‘I’m a career person but I’m also a homemaker.’
Perhaps the company’s collapse will finally give its founder, said to be working on a secretive new design project, the normality she craves. ‘I’m very much just Cath,’ she once said. ‘I’m not Cath Kidston. My life hasn’t changed.’