There's a type of founder story I love more than any other. It isn't the one with the seed round and the agency. It's the one where somebody's gran hands over twenty-five quid in the middle of lockdown and says, "Go and get whatever you want."
Maisie Crompton had literally just turned 18. She bought a sewing needle, some thread and ten tote bags off Amazon. That was the start of Totes For You, a brand that has since sold over half a million pounds' worth of just one bag, the Liberty tote, with pretty much no ad budget. Until very recently, the whole family was still packing orders in the playroom.
Here's what I took away from our conversation.
Document everything (even when it feels small)
Maisie didn't launch with a website. She launched with a TikTok series called Starting My Business in Lockdown, filming every single day, back when TikTok was mostly dancing and pointing. Those videos were reaching 500,000 to 600,000 people each. Her first drop of ten bags sold out in about two minutes. As I said to her, in hindsight that's 600,000 people for ten bags.
The lesson isn't "go viral". It's that documenting the journey is the marketing. Years later, her accountants told her they couldn't believe her profit margin, and her answer was simple: everyone else has to pay to market, and hers comes from her.
Hand over the bits you hate
Here's the part that doesn't make it onto the grid. Two years in, Maisie burnt out. She was making new product, selling out, and feeling completely fatigued. She was about to quietly quit.
What saved Totes For You wasn't a big strategy. It was honesty. Her partner Charlie took over what she calls "the boring bits" (the money, the admin, the negotiating) and Maisie went back to the creative side she loves.
If you're running your brand on your own and dreading half of it, write those bits down. That's your first hire, or your first freelancer.
Always, always order a sample
Maisie's biggest rookie error? She didn't want to pay £100 for a sample. The batch arrived and 70% of it was faulty, and the supplier didn't want to know.
Three things to take from her experience:
Order a sample. Every time.
Expect to kiss a few frogs before you find the right manufacturer.
Look for a supplier who'll start small and grow with you. Maisie's Liberty tote started at 100 pieces per colour. Now she's putting in orders for 3,000.
These days she runs two suppliers very deliberately. A smaller, quicker one makes the best-sellers, which come over by train or truck so she can restock fast. A bigger factory handles the seasonal pieces, which come by sea and can take four months.
Your sales are the truth
Maisie is brilliant at listening to her community. She's in the DMs and she's always asking what people want. But she's also learned that what people say they want and what they actually buy are two very different things.
That ties into something I see all the time with brands at this stage: selling out. It looks amazing from the outside. Behind the scenes it means big days followed by quiet weeks with nothing to sell. Once you've got wages to pay, selling out in minutes stops being a flex. Maisie says it best: when people are annoyed that something's sold out, she's more annoyed at herself.
Grow at the speed your business can handle
The thing I admire most about Maisie is that Totes For You has always stayed in profit, because it had to. It was paying the bills. She has never grown too fast.
She was making around £600,000 in sales and still running it from the house. Nobody would have guessed, and as she says, who cares? She'd rather have stability than a couple of million more in sales with no more profit to show for it.
As I said in the episode, it's one thing running a business, another thing growing one, and another thing again growing a profitable one.
And then the bit to screenshot
In the episode, Maisie shares her actual formula for a video that pops off: how she opens, why emotion beats product shots, and the one rule she never breaks when something goes wrong. I'm not going to spoil it here. Go and listen, and have your notes app open.
🎧 Listen to the full conversation with Mary Portas on The Fashion Brand Clinic Podcast, or watch it on YouTube.
And if you wish you'd been in the room, Fashion Marketing Live is back on Monday 15 March 2027. The first one sold out in 24 hours, so join the waitlist → elizabethstiles.co.uk/2027-fashion-marketing-event
Be brave with your brand this week.
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