Podcast #3: Emmy Scarterfield of Emmy London, on Creative Design, Parenthood, Building a Luxury Brand With Her Husband and The Secret To Comfortable Wedding Shoes

My guest in this episode of The Love My Dress Podcast is Emmy Scarterfield, founder and Creative Director of Emmy London, a luxury lifestyle brand that creates the most beautiful bridal and event shoes and accessories. 

The Emmy London brand exemplifies beauty and comfort and Emmy is renowned for her immaculate and intricate attention to detail, bespoke craftsmanship and quintessential British style.

As well as her hugely successful online store and beautiful boutique on the Fulham Road in South Kensington, Emmy has also designed a line of jewellery that is exclusively available at British Jeweller’s, H Samuel.

After graduating at the revered Cordwainers College in London, Emmy spent a transformative five years in Milan, where she honed her craft for design houses like Gorgio Armani and Bottega Veneta.

Returning to the UK, she had an entrepreneurial lightbulb moment that lead to the establishment of her eponymous brand in 2004 – a brand that has since gone on to become synonymous with refined, luxury style and can often be seen worn by Royalty, celebrities – and, of course, a multitude of stylish Love My Dress brides.

Emmy is not only a visionary in the world of luxury bridal fashion; she is also a loving mum to twin teenage girls and dedicated partner to her husband Dickie, who plays a crucial role as the company’s Managing Director.

We’ll explore Emmy’s path from her childhood in rural Somerset countryside, to the heart of the luxury fashion world where her business thrives today. We’ll share her insights into entrepreneurship, creativity, parenthood, luxury shoe design and building a brand with a lasting impact.

Emmy London

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Podcast Transcript

ANNABEL (HOST)

Welcome to the Love My Dress podcast. I’m your host and founder of Love My Dress, Annabel Beeforth, and I’m so thrilled that you’re here. This podcast is a tribute to the world of weddings and the people who make them happen. It has been created for anyone planning their wedding, for all wedding business owners, and anyone interested in the world of creative business entrepreneurship, whether you’re deeply involved in the wedding industry on its periphery, or just generally curious. 

In each episode, I’ll be engaging in conversation with inspiring business owners and exploring topics from weddings and business, to personal life experiences that have shaped the careers and lives of my guests.

I feel a very strong sense of purpose for humanising the wedding industry and revealing the incredible creative talent that thrives within it. In today’s fast-paced tech-dominated world that we are all navigating, I also feel a profound desire to encourage slower, more meaningful consumption of digital content. I’m passionate about storytelling and creating spaces where others can share their stories freely and authentically. Stories are the universal currency of our communication. They weave invisible threads that connect us all on a human level, that help us to understand better, foster kindness, compassion and empathy. They spark ideas and inspire us to do new things. So, storytelling is very much at the heart of this podcast. 

If you enjoy listening to this conversation, please take a moment to leave a friendly rating or review. Your support and feedback really means the world and makes such a difference. Now, it’s time to introduce my latest guest. 

My guest today is Emmy Scarterfield, founder and creative director of Emmy London, a luxury lifestyle brand that creates the most beautiful bridal and event shoes and accessories. The Emmy London brand exemplifies beauty and comfort and Emmy is renowned for her immaculate and intricate attention to detail, her bespoke craftsmanship and quintessential British style. As well as her hugely successful online store and a beautiful boutique on the Fulham Road in South Kensington, Emmy has also designed a line of jewellery that is exclusively available at British Jewellers, H. Samuel. 

After graduating at the revered Cordwainers College in London, Emmy spent a transformative five years in Milan, where she honed her craft for design houses like Giorgio Armani and Bottega Veneta. Returning to the UK, she had an entrepreneurial lightbulb moment that led to the establishment of her eponymous brand in 2004. A brand that has since gone on to become synonymous with refined luxury style, and can often be seen worn by royalty, celebrities, and of course a multitude of stylish Love My Dress brides. 

Emmy is not only a visionary in the world of luxury bridal fashion, she is also a loving mum to twin teenage girls and a dedicated partner to her husband Dickie, who plays a crucial role as the company’s Managing Director. 

Today, we’ll explore Emmy’s path from her childhood in rural Somerset, to the heart of the luxury fashion world where her business thrives today. We’ll share her insights into entrepreneurship, creativity, parenthood, luxury bridal design, and building a brand with a lasting impact. So grab a cuppa and join me for an intimate and heartwarming conversation that offers a glimpse into the life and passions of Emmy Scarterfield. 

Emmy, welcome to the Love My Dress podcast.

EMMY SCARTERFIELD OF EMMY LONDON  (GUEST)

Well, thank you so much for having me and thank you for such a warm and detailed intro. I guess one of my favourite things to do is to chat, so doing a podcast with you seems the perfect thing right now.

ANNABEL (HOST)

Oh, thank you, Emmy. It was really fun having the opportunity to immerse myself in your world as I prepared for this conversation. 

Now, I do know that your childhood played an influential role in the choices that you’d make that would eventually lead you onto this path. Can you take us back to those early years and provide some insight into the experiences and influences that set you onto this extraordinary journey?

EMMY SCARTERFIELD OF EMMY LONDON  (GUEST)

So going right back, I’m one of four. My parents were super young parents. So my mum actually had my sister when she was 18. It was the 70s. They were kind of very into the Greenpeace movement. They actually bought a house with another couple they were friendly with. And so we lived in our house with another family as a kind of commune sort of situation, which was, I suppose, from my parents’ perspective, probably quite chaotic and a bit challenging at times and sort of, you know, trying to navigate dynamics and stuff. But as a child, it was really magical. We had loads of space. We had a big garden. There were always people there. There were just loads of kind of big meals sat round together. It just felt like that sort of Christmas feeling every day of, you know, like lots of hustle and bustle. So that’s kind of my early years. 

My dad was a geography teacher and he used to call it the coal face. So from that I gleaned he didn’t really enjoy his job that much. He kind of lived for the holidays. He was really into sailing. So all of the school holidays, we would be clambering around on boats, which I was wishing the whole time were horses, I have to confess. And none of us, much to my dad’s sadness, really took to the whole boating life. 

My mum was a stay-at-home mum very much into making our own clothes. And she was a very kind of self-sufficient provider. So we had chickens and lots of meals based on lentils, and they made their own yoghurt. I think that probably gives you a good picture. But yeah, my mum was a brilliant mum. And my dad taught me, the most important thing my dad taught me was to respect and love the sea and also do a job that you are passionate about and you enjoy, which is absolutely what all of us have strived to achieve. 

And so I always kind of think that actually if you do a job that you love, it’s not really like working. So, yeah, so that was my early years. I think it was quite clear from the get-go that I was a bit more, like, creative and headstrong and a little bit… I lived in sort of a bit of an imaginary world quite a lot of the time. I didn’t really conform well to academic studies at school. 

In later life, I’ve sort of realised that I am very likely to be dyslexic but I wasn’t diagnosed as a child. So I struggled a little bit at school because I was, I knew, knew like the answers and I academically was bright, but I really struggled with getting that on paper and relaying those kind of things in that very kind of conformed way. So I did struggle a little bit and found that quite frustrating. So my outlet was really to be really good at art and the more creative subjects, and that’s where I could really shine. 

So I had a good experience at school, like socially. I’m still friends with some of the friends I met at school and stuff. But, yeah, I do sort of feel like that whole kind of traditional education really wasn’t probably suitable for my brain and how my brain processes things. So I was kind of quite sure about the path I was going to take, because obviously when you’re good at something and you shine at something, you’re more drawn to that. So I knew that I wanted to kind of go into more design, creative, fashion, textiles, possibly. 

But fortunately, where I grew up in Somerset, a little village called Chilcompton, is where Mulberry is based. So actually, we live next door to the factory shop, which caused loads of mayhem for my parents in terms of parking. But for me, it was amazing because it was like having my own kind of dressing up box right next door. So I’d quite often go in there, probably really annoying the staff, but just having a little play with all the stuff in there. And they also used to have like a big skip out the front, probably not amazing for aesthetics, but they would have loads of leather bits that they’d finished with and little buckles and stuff like that in there. And so I used to just help myself. 

I remember my friend holding my ankles, and I’d go, like, dive into the skip and get some bits and bobs, and, like, make stuff out of them. My grandparents on my dad’s side were tailors, and so I had their old sewing machine, you know, the ones with the handles, they’re not electric. So I used to make, like, bags and stuff like that on that. And if friends came over to, for like a play date, I suppose you’d call it now, but not in those days, you know, our activity would be like, right, let’s make some bags. And they’d be like, oh, okay. So that was kind of my first foray. 

I really enjoyed kind of like, make, like, I suppose, pattern cutting in sort of very rudimentary way and like making it and finishing the whole process in that sort of one sitting, I used to really enjoy that process. And my mum, as I said, she used to make a lot of her clothes and our clothes. And so our kitchen table was quite often strewn with loads of fabric and pins and stuff like that. So it seemed like a sort of very sort of natural progression. 

In terms of like the real shoe moment, I suppose, there’s a few kind of sparks that I remember. So I must have been about two or three or something. And I remember walking to the village school with my sister and my mum to drop my sister off, my older sister, and eyeing up some shoes on other kids and asking my mum to ask the parents if I could have them when they’d grown out of them. My mum was like, absolutely not, that’s really embarrassing. And I was like, why? 

So I sort of remember obviously just kind of having that radar of looking down before I looked up and clocking the shoes. So that  was probably quite unusual. I also, because there were so many people in our house, I used to have a box of all the shoes that were sort of outgrown and set up a shoe shop in my bedroom. And they’d be like horrible sort of brown, not horrible, but like pretty scuzzy brown leather sandals or shoes where the toes have been cut off at the end to get a little bit more room. And then I remember my sister had a pair of Scholls and I remember looking at them from my bedroom window and they were in the garden and I was like, oh they’re tiny, they’re gonna fit me and I ran down and I was like, oh, of course it was the perspective. 

So I asked my dad if he’d help me make some. So we cut up some wood, you know, we didn’t like, you know, we didn’t sand it to the shape of my foot, it was just, it was literally just a plank of wood. 

ANNABEL (HOST)

How old were you here Emmy?

EMMY SCARTERFIELD OF EMMY LONDON  (GUEST)

Well, I was at primary school, so maybe seven or something. And so we cut the wood to the right length for my foot, and then we nailed a bit of elastic over the top. I mean, it was super, super basic. And my dad said to me, right, you mustn’t wear these to school. I was like, yeah, absolutely ridiculous idea. Absolutely not. They’re not going out. They’re not going out this house, don’t worry. 

Of course, I took them to school the next day, and at break time everyone was playing, and I got them out of my bag and put them on, and then the whistle blew and we all had to stand in a line. And I walked across the playground in these very noisy, flip-floppy, homemade Scholls that I really couldn’t walk very well in because the elastic was, you know, the whole kind of ergonomics of it were a disaster. And everyone turned around and laughed at me. Just mortifying. And I was kind of a bit like, we can see why my dad said don’t wear them to school. 

So that, but I did kind of love that sort of process of making them and kind of getting close to the dream. And then also where I grew up, not only did we have the impact and the influence of Mulberry, we had the Clark’s factory was quite close by. So a lot of parents at my school either worked at Clark’s or worked at Mulberry. So to work for a shoe brand or a luxury leather brand was very much in my stratosphere. So it wasn’t kind of beyond the norm. 

So Clark’s used to come to our school and choose children to wear test new styles, which was for me the absolute pinnacle of all my dreams. And I used to almost dislocate my shoulder, putting my hand up to be chosen, and I was never chosen.

ANNABEL (HOST)

Oh, no, I thought you were going to tell me about this amazing story where you got to try on all these shoes and you were just in your element.

EMMY SCARTERFIELD OF EMMY LONDON  (GUEST)

I was never chosen, and I just never quite… I don’t think I’ve quite recovered from it. You know, we didn’t have very much money, so we got a pair of shoes, like, once a year for school. To have got an extra pair of shoes would have been a massive deal. But yeah, it wasn’t to be. But just that sort of idea of having that opportunity was just really magical. 

And then I remember on my ninth birthday, my parents arranged this party for my friends, and we played games and stuff. But when I got home from school, they said, oh, you’ve got an extra present. And they’d put it under my pillow on my bed. And I just couldn’t believe my eyes. They were burgundy patent shoes, like flat shoes. But they were that, don’t know if you remember it, but they weren’t real leather. They were almost like coated plastic, like spongy stuff. So they were kind of soft, but looked hard, if that makes sense. So they were like these little slip-ons, and they had these hinges at the side, so you could have them as Mary Jane, or you could swing it back and have it as a slip-on. And I literally, from that moment, I loved the smell of them, I loved the versatility of them, I loved the look of them, the feel of them. I literally could not believe that my parents had bought something so modern. And I wasn’t interested in the party after that at all. I was just in my own magical world with these shoes. And of course, I only wanted to wear them as slip-ons. 

But I think that notion of having that flexibility and versatility of styling them has massively influenced my designs going forward, because that’s sort of always been a running theme. 

So yeah, so a few sort of shoe highlights. And oh, I’ve missed out one that I’ve talked about a lot in interviews and things, but one of my earliest memories is putting those wooden blocks into my socks and making my own high heels, because I’ll add my mum was also very sort of model-esque and six-foot, so she didn’t wear high heels, so I didn’t ever have the opportunity to kind of like try hers on and play around in those, so I made my own, which I still think is quite an interesting concept and I loved that clip-cloppy noise.

ANNABEL (HOST)

I get that. I used to do it with my grandma’s shoes when I was younger. I loved that sound.

EMMY SCARTERFIELD OF EMMY LONDON  (GUEST)

Yeah, so that definitely sparked a bit of a shoe passion. 

So yeah, so I left school, I did A-levels in Bristol, which was a bit of a blur. I did fashion and textiles and art and design. So stuck to my shining subjects. And then I did an art foundation at Weston-super-Mare.  Odd location choice, but I loved that freedom and just a year of trying out different mediums and with no pressure, really, of exams and things like that. I really enjoyed that. 

And then I kind of got a bit lost and moved to London with a boyfriend who was a bit older. And very much kind of, I was, so I was like 18, 19, but thought I was super grown up. And I very much aspired to having a Mulberry weekend bag and sort of living a very kind of composed, sensible life. And I got a job selling sofas at Sofa Workshop, which is still going, I think, on the King’s Road, so not that far from my shop. And I loved it, and I was really good at it, and I discovered the skill of selling. It was kind of semi-bespoke. It’s very similar. In fact, I based my bespoke concept on the concept that they have there. 

So their concept is you go in, and you choose your shape and the legs and the fabric, and then the sofa gets made up. So you’re basically choosing the basis of a kind of menu. I loved it and I loved selling and I earned really good money because I was getting paid commission and things like that. 

And then I suddenly had and then I went to Glastonbury Festival because I used to go as a kid with my family. And so I went with my mum and my sister and I just had that moment of like, what am I doing? Like what happened to my dreams? What happened to shoes? Why am I living this life which does not feel like my life? And so then, so from that point, everything kind of started to unravel a little bit and I moved back home to Bath with my mum and kind of regrouped and really kind of set my path. So I don’t regret what I did in London those few years but I’m very thankful that I didn’t just carry on with that life, because I don’t think that would have been that fulfilling. But I learned so much and so I definitely don’t regret that.

ANNABEL (HOST)

It’s like a helpful detour.

EMMY SCARTERFIELD OF EMMY LONDON  (GUEST)

Yeah exactly and I definitely have put it into a positive and productive way. So then I kind of remembered that I wanted to do shoes. And so I went to Cordwainers, which is a shoe college. So they do shoes, bags, and saddlery. So quite specific. I kind of feel like I missed out a little bit on that sort of student life, which was fine, actually, for me, because I’d already had that working experience. So I really cherished and valued what I was doing then. So I was really dedicated and studious. But if you wanted to go there for that student life, that would be quite disappointing. 

So I did my degree there and learned all about shoemaking. A lot of the teachers there were ex-factory people of the local factories in Hackney, shoe factories. So they were like very down to earth, very knowledgeable, and very happy to share their skills. 

And so, yeah, I did my degree there and met some of my best friends there. From there, I went to Marks and Spencers, had my first job, which I kind of see as a bit of a sort of finishing school stage. I always sort of think that actually any sort of work experience, whether you like it or not, is really valuable experience, because what I learned there is my personality and my skill set weren’t really that suited to very corporate structures and not very hands-on with the product. 

So I really sort of established and acknowledged that I’m much more of a craft person and I want to be able to speak in meetings and I want to have my voice heard. And that wasn’t what that job was at all. 

My parents were very much like, great, she’s got a great job, obviously in those days, so it was the 90s, so it was like a job for life, really secure. They were like, great. And I was like, yeah, I don’t like it. They’re like, no, let’s settle. And I was like, no, I’m going to go and live in Milan. And they were like, oh, my gosh. 

So I ditched the well-paid, secure, nine-to-five job for, essentially, it was like an internship at Giorgio Armani, and so I left London with a bag. I had learned Italian as part of my degree, but essentially, it’s on a Friday morning at 9am, so I’d missed quite a lot of sessions. And I basically went to Italy. I’d never been to Italy before, so I had no idea what I was going to. I could pretty much ask for a toasted cheese and ham sandwich, which turns out was not really that popular there. And it was terrifying. The whole experience was terrifying, really demanded a lot of mental strength. 

So essentially, my internship at Giorgio Armani was a glass room in a design studio where all the proper designers didn’t speak to you. And it was like a sort of hot house, literally, where I was there doing shoes and accessories, and then there would be another designer doing knitwear, one for menswear, womenswear, that kind of set up. And we would have to be in at 9am and sketch all day, every day. And at the end of the day, someone would come in, not speak to us, but take our drawings. And we would never know what happened to those drawings. So we got no feedback. And the next day, you’d have to do the same. So I think a lot of, in my cohort, other designers really struggled mentally because it was so kind of demanding, but also like one-way traffic. It was so weird. 

But I actually can sketch quite quickly. I didn’t really run out of ideas. I kept it going. And I kind of did okay. I didn’t crumble. Yeah, I did find it challenging for sure, so I didn’t stay there for that long really. I don’t think it is really designed for people to stay there long term, but I did manage to stay in Italy for a period of five years, which was definitely the best thing I did. I met some of my friends from Cordwainers were there. So that sort of really enhanced and established our friendships. I’m still friends with them. I met my, one of my best friends, Leanne, who I lived with, and she lives up the road and we live in each other’s pockets now still got kids the same age, etc. We met there. I met my husband Dickie through another friend there and for my career, it basically was five years where I literally just focused on my career. That’s the whole reason I was there and just learned so much about the industry and the product and just the whole kind of function of where I fitted into that. 

But after five years I was homesick and I was sort of getting to the age where I was kind of, I don’t know, it’s very much an existence that is kind of superficial, in a way, because you know, there’s lots of social things there, but essentially people are only really interested in you for where you work. And I felt like I was with people, other than the friends that I’d made, I felt like I was with people a lot of the time that didn’t really know me. And that’s kind of doable for a period of time, but then you need some sort of anchor points to kind of shape your life a little bit. 

So me and my friend Leanne decided to move home. So we did, and we lived together in Tufnell Park and sort of regained our identity as young, single designers in London. And actually that was the hardest bit, I have to say. Leaving was easy by comparison, but coming back and re-establishing life here and working out, because you feel like everything’s changed for you and you’ve changed and you’ve grown up so much, but so many things that you come back to have stayed the same. And then I think when you’ve lived abroad and worked abroad, you have this very unsettling feeling like you could actually just go anywhere. Like you don’t have to go home. So that was quite unsettling for a while and then I met Dickie and things started to sort of fall into place and feel a little bit settled. 

So it was around sort of like, I think I was about 28, 29 when I decided this freelance game was a little bit tiresome and a bit unpredictable. And I mean, I sort of question my logic now, because I was kind of working three days a week, earning really good money, had time to go to the gym, look after myself, take time off when I wanted. But in true Emmy style, thought, no, that’s just too easy. I was at this point designing and kind of following production for other brands, which is kind of exciting, but essentially you’re fulfilling someone else’s vision, which is always quite difficult, especially when you interpret your own vision, and that isn’t always necessarily the same.

So I was doing some shoes for a brand called House of Jazz for their catwalk show and I was flying out to Spain to go and collect them, or at least I thought I was. And I got there and they hadn’t even started. So I was like, oh my gosh, this is so embarrassing and I was just like, I’m just so embarrassed that I’ve got to phone them and just say, you’re not gonna have any shoes. So I was like, I just can’t do that. It’s just too awful. So I just said to the factory, OK, so I’m going to stay here, and you’re going to make them, and then I’m going to leave and take them with me when you finish them. And they were like, OK. So I just sat there in the factory watching them, and they were like, do you not want to go to the shopping centre or go, you know, and I was like, no, it’s fine I’ll just watch you make them because I knew as soon as I turned my back they would stop making them. 

So I was on my own so it was quite lonely and obviously it’s not a great position to be in when you’re somewhere where people don’t really want you to be and I just thought to myself this is really horrible and I really don’t want to be in this position again. I’m not going to do this anymore. So the time that I had watching them make the shoes and then sort of on my own in a hotel room, I used to do my business plan, which is the most un-Emmy thing, most sort of logical process-based exercise I think I’ve ever encountered. And I basically kind of worked out everything I would need. I kind of worked out, obviously it was kind of a really early day so I didn’t know all the problems that were going to come through the last 20 years, but I foresaw some of the issues and challenges we may have and tried to work out solutions before they happened. 

And so kind of went through all this kind of a lot of just thinking in my head and jotting ideas down. And I was kind of conscious, you know, I’m sort of in a bit of a bubble here. I haven’t got anyone to talk to about it. So this could be like a total disaster and really bad idea. But I promised myself when I eventually got on the plane home with the shoes for the catwalk, I promised myself, when we landed, if I still thought it was a good idea and kind of like the reality check of being home and hopefully a slice of sanity, I would just do it. And that’s what I did. So I dropped off the shoes at the catwalk. They were really pleased. They didn’t know what I’d been through to get them there and just thought, I’m never going to do that again. 

And so the first thing I did was I rented the room that we started the business in, which was a room above a lingerie shop in Cross Street in North London. I didn’t have, like, a stable living situation. I didn’t really have a big kitchen table, so I couldn’t have started it at home. And also I was conscious that I needed somewhere for brides to come and see the collection. So it needed to be a space that was customer facing. So my sort of logic was that, okay, so I’ll get the room, I’ll get a chaise for people to sit on, and then I’ve kind of got to do it because I will have made those investments. So I bought a chaise for 700 pounds or something and just kind of thought, eek, really got to do it now. 

My backup was that if this doesn’t work out I’ll just freelance from this space, but fortunately didn’t really have to ever do that. So yeah, so I started, I think I had five single shoes, not even a pair of shoes, five single styles on a shelf and my first bride cancelled. She didn’t know that she was my first bride. So you can imagine like the night before I was like finishing the decorating, the place smelt a little bit of paint, like really to the wire. And then she left me a voice message saying she wasn’t coming. So I was like, oh, all that work. But then I got a walk in towards the end of the day, and she wanted to buy the shoes and it felt so surreal. And I just couldn’t believe it and then that was it, we started. 

So I did everything myself to begin with. So the selling, the finishing, so that obviously we had a workshop that made, after the experience of Spain, I definitely didn’t want to do production in Spain. No offence to Spain production, but I’d kind of… I felt like I wanted a new experience. With my experience from Italy, I knew that my project was going to be too small fry for them, and I would really struggle to get them interested and so I chose Portugal because I had had a little bit of experience with my freelance jobs of producing in Portugal and I’d made friends with a very important person that turned out to be really important in my journey, José Neves, who has gone on to launch Farfetch. He’s Portuguese and is from a shoemaking family. So he had the connections that I needed to set that up. 

So yeah, we just started super small, really really organic. I chose bridal really because I felt like my skill set and my taste level and the price points that was going to come out at was more suited to bridal and after five years in Italy working at high-end fashion, I hadn’t fallen out of love with fashion completely but I didn’t want to be in that vulnerable fashion position. I wanted something to be a bit more predictable and you know I didn’t have money backed up for this to sustain me. It needed to make money to live on.

ANNABEL (HOST)

But you weren’t married at the time. There was no kind of wedding experience you’d had, not like that classic kind of, I get married and now I want to do wedding things. It wasn’t like that. It was just you knew bridal was a potential space.

EMMY SCARTERFIELD OF EMMY LONDON  (GUEST)

No, it wasn’t at all. I didn’t really know that much about weddings, to be fair, and friends were sort of just getting engaged, but hadn’t really gone to any weddings. So it was a completely new area for me, and one that I hadn’t really, you know, I’d never really kind of daydreamt about getting married, so I didn’t really know much about it at all. But I did do a bit of research in the sense of what was out there before I launched and I just identified a huge gap in the market of, you know, where do women like me get shoes from that they’re going to be excited about and as excited about the dress and not feel like they’ve compromised or overspent on something that’s not very good quality, or that there’s something that’s actually really uncomfortable, or something that originally was designed for fashion and now is just in bridal but actually isn’t really that well-designed for wearing all day and dancing all night and so I was like there’s a huge gap and I think I can probably do a better job of what’s out there.

ANNABEL (HOST)

That’s really fascinating actually because you have such a distinctive style as well. I thought you would have got married and then decided that you wanted to kind of replicate that style that you had in your own wedding, but it really fascinates me that you just knew you wanted to move into bridal anyway and to have that style that you do that stayed with you all of this time. 

EMMY SCARTERFIELD OF EMMY LONDON  (GUEST)

Yeah, I mean it was more kind of rudimentary than that in the sense that I knew I needed to go into a market that wasn’t fashion, that didn’t have that vulnerability. And I had friends from college or colleagues from college that had launched their own brand, but actually it was a lot of press and not a lot of orders. And I was like, I can’t afford to do that. I have to have something that is more solid than that. And so the other research that I’d done before I’d thought about the bridal shoe business was to do like really luxury, really well thought out nappy bags. But I actually bored myself doing the research. I mean, there was definitely a gap in the market, but I just kind of thought, I’m actually really bored of thinking about this now. So I’m, you know, three years in, I’m going to be like sick of it. So that just doing that research was that enough in itself just to kind of think that this is not a viable plan. 

So yes, it was really good to like learn more about the fashion, the bridal business coming from a fashion background and one of the things I really sort of learned really quickly was that because I was doing all the PR press kind of stuff as well and I was terrified about doing that because the only experience I’d had of press in fashion was just absolutely terrifying. And I just found the bridal press so delightful and approachable and so receptive of something new and just really easy to engage with. So that was such a positive and a good sort of way to grow a brand. But I do feel, looking back now, I spent a lot, those formative years were really about establishing the brand rather than the business. Like in terms of sort of bottom line and the revenue and things, we were tiny, but we were making really good progress in sort of establishing our brand and getting recognition for that, which was really valuable.

ANNABEL (HOST)

Yeah, I remember discovering your brand, it must’ve been in 2008, because that was the year I was planning my wedding. And I couldn’t believe what I’d found. It was so different to everything else that was out there, which at the time felt very kind of glitzy and lots of sparkle, but you did yours in a way that was so, so elegant. It was just an instant hit for me and I remember you posted me or a member of your team posted me a pair of shoes to try on for size and I saved so hard my pair of Emmy shoes. I’m lucky enough to own several pairs of Emmy shoes now, but that your brand feels like part of the history of my own business and the kind of legacy of finding the inspiration to start Love My Dress in the first place, because I did that. I started my own blog because of all the amazing brands I found when planning my own wedding. 

So it’s quite fascinating for me to hear your story, your legacy story and understand that gosh, it was only four years after she set up her business, I discovered her and just fell in love and I remember that space as well above the lingerie store. I remember coming to see you up there.

EMMY SCARTERFIELD OF EMMY LONDON  (GUEST)

Yeah, we sort of lovingly call it the cupboard now, but I loved that space so much. And it was so perfect for then, because I had my twins in 2008, the year you got married.

ANNABEL (HOST)

2009, I got married. I planned, yeah, 2008 was a big planning year, but I had no idea you were pregnant with twins at that time either.

EMMY SCARTERFIELD OF EMMY LONDON  (GUEST)

Yeah. I lived in a very kind of close proximity and everything felt very sort of reachable and even if I wasn’t physically with my girls, I was only a stone’s throw away. So, yeah, that period has very kind of fond memories. But we totally outgrew that space in physically and mentally. The ceilings were really low and we took doors off cupboards so we could fit more desk space in. We were storing a lot of shoes at our house. Yeah, we grew out of that space long, way before we actually physically moved. 

ANNABEL (HOST)

So you say we, when did Dickie, your husband, join your business? Because I’m assuming that he did that and then you made the move to your own bigger retail high street spot?

EMMY SCARTERFIELD OF EMMY LONDON  (GUEST)

Yes. So basically, I don’t know exactly the year, but I think it must have been around like 201/2012 or something. So Dickie is someone that is much, much more of a consumer shopper, really into fashion, way more than I am. He always was really passionate about what I was doing and really interested in it and saw a lot of potential in it. 

He actually did put a little bit of investment money into the business when I first started, which was a bit annoyed about because I was expecting that money to go on an engagement ring, but I had to wait a bit longer for that. So, but he was kind of watching it grow from the sidelines, but he had a job that was very demanding in technology. So he worked for a French-based company that lived in London, but he would travel a lot to Paris and a lot of his clients were on the West Coast of America, so his hours were like bonkers. So especially when I had the girls, he would be away for weeks on end. So I was essentially looking after them on my own and trying to run the business. It was really, really hand-to-mouth. And when there were about four or five, his job essentially was kind of presented to him as, your job is moving to the West Coast of America. And we were like, nah, don’t want to do that. Because we were, we, you know, the girls had started school, we had just bought a house, the business was, you know, we’d survived the really challenging financial years of the crash and having twins at the same time. We were like, we’ve put too much into this to walk away. But the alternative was basically unemployment for him. 

So, we thought about him doing another job, but really his heart lay in joining me, so but it wasn’t something we went into lightly because I was, the business was very much mine and he has a completely different approach to everything to me. And so I felt a little bit like, not sure if I’m ready to share this, but I had got to the point where I was spending a lot of my time doing things that I wasn’t actually really that good at, like wages, all of the banking stuff, the strategy stuff, the tech stuff, that I, that it’s just not what I, I’m not good at it and I’m not, like I don’t enjoy it. So I was getting to the stage where I was looking to bring someone in to kind of fill those gaps and so that event really was kind of really well-timed. And I was like, well, actually, it makes sense for you to join, because who are you going to trust more than anyone else, the person that you’re married to? But I was really concerned about how it was going to affect our relationship. And so I basically drew up a poster with all of the things that I was going to be doing and all of the things that he was going to be doing and the two should never cross, which sounds a bit extreme, but it was really helpful because he was essentially joining a business that needed quite a lot of input in the skills that he had. But I didn’t really want him to then start getting involved in the design and the aesthetics and the branding and the product, because I felt like we had that nailed, or I had that nailed. 

So he’s been in the business about 10, maybe 10 years, maybe more and it was a huge adjustment. I mean, his previous experience of work, like he’s worked since he was 16, has all been in a very male-dominated industry and for that reason adopted a very sort of way of communicating and like motivating people that was so not appropriate for our business. So he definitely had to really adjust to that different environment because we were not going to adjust to him. So for the business it’s been really, really positive and for family life it was amazing because it meant that both of us overnight were like much more available and flexible. So especially when the girls were young we work really hard for 6 weeks in that term time and then we would both take off all school holidays. So it meant that that sort of rhythm really worked for us, where we could kind of almost sort of go full pelt and then stop and have that time with the kids. 

The business definitely has grown massively and benefited from that input of structure and process that Dickie brings to the table and discipline. In terms of relationship, I think we’re still working out, well, we’re still together, so still married, but I think what we’ve struggled with a little bit is just really establishing those boundaries because working together on a growing business that we’re both really passionate about and love, it’s really difficult to draw a line of where that stops when you’re at home. And so I think I’ve, because I’ve been in the business for nearly 20 years, I’ve become, and previously I had been freelancing, I’d kind of learned those skills of like separation and like switching off a lot better than Dickie. He’s still kind of trying to establish those skills and it’s not easy, and he is like, really driven and really, really ambitious. And so sometimes I just have to kind of like, we’re at home. 

A really kind of poignant time for us was, so about five years ago now, I had some really serious health issues where I had to have my kidney removed. And it was around the time that we were doing the jewellery licence. So we have the jewellery licence for H Samuel in the UK, and then we also have an equivalent one in Canada. But at this time, five years ago, we were just negotiating a contract, a really massive contract in the US for the equivalent jewellers called Kay. So it was worth a lot financially and was going to be a huge, it could have been a huge injection of revenue into the business. And so we were negotiating that contract and we’d been back and forth to the States whilst I wasn’t well with this kidney that was not happy. I remember flying back and being at JFK. I was sort of sat on, you know, those really hard sort of airport seats, and I was sat where you’re kind of almost straight, so I couldn’t really bend very comfortably. And I was thinking, my kidney is really not happy, but I don’t want to phone my kidney doctor because I think he’s going to say, don’t fly. 

I flew home, but I knew that I was like really pushing myself physically. And anyway, so a couple of weeks later, I was in hospital to have, you know, it was a planned operation. So, you know, things were all in place for the kids and we’d sorted everything out and we’d kind of taken the time out of work and stuff, but this contract still wasn’t finalised. So the anaesthetist comes in and does all the checks and talks me through the operation and what’s going to happen and where I’m going to be and da da da da da. You know, I’m kind of scared a little bit. I’m looking forward to having this kidney out because it’s causing me a lot of pain and discomfort, but, you know, any big operation is quite scary and Dickie’s asking me to sign this contract and I’m like, right, okay. So here’s the boundary at this moment, you’re my husband. You’re not my work partner. Work is not here. You’re my husband. So all you need to do, if you don’t know what to say, say nothing, just hold my hand. But I’m not signing a contract right now. You can wait till I come out of the operation when I’m at home recovered. And he was like, Okay, okay, got you. But I was like, wow.

ANNABEL (HOST)

It’s interesting. I mean, God, what a story to share. But I think for some people, those boundaries, learning when to separate, you know, draw the line and protect workspace, especially if you work at home as well, and you bring your work home to home, it’s incredibly hard. But I can imagine how difficult that was for Dickie, when you were at the point of growth and such an exciting evolution. Come on, let’s go, let’s just get this in the bag, let’s secure it. But no, this is a classic time for you to learn that there’s a line that has to be drawn. 

EMMY SCARTERFIELD OF EMMY LONDON  (GUEST)

Yeah, exactly. So it was quite a sort of steep learning curve, but that sort of period of time was quite crucial to us, really establishing those boundaries and really kind of recognising that actually the most important thing is being healthy because the contract is completely irrelevant if I don’t come out of this operation. 

ANNABEL (HOST)

If you can’t fulfil your commitment, what’s the point to any of it? 

EMMY SCARTERFIELD OF EMMY LONDON  (GUEST)

Yeah. Exactly, it’s all irrelevant. So just sort of seeing the wood for the trees really and just having that clarity. But yeah, it’s definitely something that we look back on and go, wow, we were kind of on quite different pages right then, right in that moment. And I guess kind of being on the same page has been a bit of a running theme. And we’ve kind of learned that we, to work together successfully, we need to be on the same page in terms of ambition and emotionally and like time that we focus on our children and on each other and as a family and all that kind of stuff. And when we haven’t been on the same page, the wheels come off.

ANNABEL (HOST)

It takes a lot of effort, doesn’t it? I think when you live with a person and work with a person you love.

EMMY SCARTERFIELD OF EMMY LONDON  (GUEST)

Yeah, yeah, it does. We would have been married about 19 years. So we married quite soon after establishing the business. But, you know, I still find him attractive. He still makes me laugh and I think that is the most important thing, I think. And essentially, just try, you know, just maintaining being kind to each other is sort of the most important thing, really, to maintain the two camps of work and home.

ANNABEL (HOST)

I think it’s incredible. By the way, congratulations on 19 years of marriage and 19 years of business. Are you going to be doing anything next year to celebrate 20 years?

EMMY SCARTERFIELD OF EMMY LONDON  (GUEST)

Well, yeah, 20 years, it feels like so epic, but one makes me feel really old because it’s gone so quickly and I feel mostly I’m really proud of what we’ve achieved. But there is a little bit of frustration there as well that we could have done so much more if we hadn’t have had all of the challenges we’ve had in the last few years. Next year also coincides with my 50th birthday, so I am actually quite old, so I think we’ll probably do a combined party or something. We definitely won’t let the year pass without celebrating.

ANNABEL (HOST)

That sounds like fun. We’ll both be 50 together.

EMMY SCARTERFIELD OF EMMY LONDON  (GUEST)
Oh, huge, huge.

ANNABEL (HOST)

It seems like such a big number, doesn’t it? 

Talk to me a little bit about recent years then. So, I mean, the story so far has been fascinating, but let’s have a little sort of real talk about the last few years and what that’s been like for you as a business owner.

EMMY SCARTERFIELD OF EMMY LONDON  (GUEST)

So I guess the whole sort of kidney drama thing, although it wasn’t life-threatening, I knew I was going to get better, but it completely floored me. So I had a series of operations and then finished up with the kidney removal thing. And that was around the time that we were opening up the new boutique. So the timing was pretty rubbish. So I did take a lot, I did take about six months out of work. Actually, looking back, it was actually a really, really good, pivotal moment of just changing the dynamic of my role in the business. So essentially, it meant that without that not too much warning, because I had no idea I was going to be floored for six months, I thought I’d be back at work within a few days. 

The team and Dickie really had to become very self-sufficient and independent without my input. Actually opening up the boutique without me kind of being hands-on day-to-day was a really good way of establishing that part of the business has to operate without me. And so that’s pretty much how it is still today. So I have a really good team in there. They know what they’re I oversee aesthetics and processes and what I’ve learnt, but essentially it’s a very kind of contained entity of the business that doesn’t need my input every day, which I know for a lot of small or similar businesses, that’s not the case, but it was kind of that situation which forced that to happen. 

I think also being a mum of twins makes you really good at delegating. So, yeah, so that was one challenge which we’ve kind of turned into a positive. I think also having those sort of curveballs where your health is in danger is a real wake-up call in terms of what is actually important to you. 

So I talked a little bit about the contract that we had with the US, which could have been major. We had it for a little while, but we lost it in Covid because they needed to focus on less fringe contracts. But we had a few opportunities where we could have had a very different sized business in the sense of with that contract or like investment opportunities, and actually, when I really thought about it, the most important thing for Dickie and I, having the business, is still enjoying it, but also maintaining our freedom. And as long as it sustains us financially within a reasonable, you know, certainly no frills or extras or extravagances. But as long as we’re surviving and we have the freedom, that’s like everything you can possibly want. Having more kind of revenue and like losing that freedom and sharing that control or losing that control became really unattractive. 

When you’re growing a business, one of the challenges or one of the things that I’d kind of taken for granted, because obviously at the beginning you’re striving to make it bigger and better and more and more successful, and actually at some point you have to kind of go, actually my main challenge now is to keep it as it is because this is the lifestyle I want. This is what it’s providing me and I don’t want someone to tell me that I can’t go on holiday with my children at that point. That’s not the lifestyle I want at all. So those challenges have really kind of shaped that path going forward, I think, whereas I could have quite easily and happily been on that treadmill of growth and more and better and but for what?

ANNABEL (HOST)

Exactly, I can relate to that very much indeed, definitely around the whole let’s just sustain, let’s just keep what we have and enjoy what we’ve got and keep our freedom and I think as you go through different adversities and challenges in life and also as you get a bit older you do change perspective don’t you and you want to take your foot off the pedal a little bit as well to have that extra time to focus on your health and to focus on your family. 

So tell me about the last couple of years and how your business as a really hugely successful online digital store and retailer, how have you coped moving through the last few years? I can imagine that was hugely impactful for you.

EMMY SCARTERFIELD OF EMMY LONDON  (GUEST)

So I guess the next big challenge, which affected all of us in many ways and in lots of different ways, it was COVID. And Dickie and I responded to that really differently. He was very much on a five-year growth strategy plan, put a lot of effort into and time into making a plan but then sort of as COVID was approaching, we could see it was not going to be possible or sustainable. And the first few weeks of COVID really were terrifying, obviously, as it was for everybody. But I guess as employers, the only kind of thing I can describe it as is holding up a really heavy, slippery fish tank above your head and all the fish in it are your employees and all you’re doing is trying to stay still and hold it up and not spill any of the water. And we were thinking, you know, how are we going to look after everybody? How are we going to survive? Are we going to have a business at the end of it? And then the furlough scheme came in and I remember presenting that to the team and Dickie and I were almost in tears at the relief that they were going to be alright. And then the next morning I was just like, oh fuck, that like totally means that I and Dickie have now got to do everything to keep the business. And we weren’t allowed to, staff weren’t allowed to, I don’t know if you remember, they weren’t allowed to respond to emails or you weren’t really allowed to contact them. And I sort of removed myself from the sort of daily logistics to the extent where I didn’t even know how to send a DHL parcel. All the shoes that had been in work for customers, because obviously at this time we weren’t sure if the closure was going to be for a few weeks or whatever. So we had everything delivered to our house. And my living room was full of shoes that needed to be sent out to customers. And obviously, the balance payments were going to be crucial to our survival. So the first few DHL parcels went to the wrong customer. It was a total disaster. 

But anyway, I set up a packaging station on our kitchen table. I listened to a lot of Women’s Hour. Dickie struggled with ripping up this five-year strategy plan, but not to disrespect anyone that suffered with COVID as the illness or lost people, but I actually found that I really excelled in the moment of kind of hand-to-mouth existence, and I kind of really enjoyed the challenge of being in survival mode. So once I’d got all the shoes out to the right customers by DHL, I then decided to try and engage with our customers over a screen with the potential of selling or at least kind of flirting the idea of what they might like that they could buy online or visit our store once we were open again. 

So we put a little thing out on Instagram that I was going to be running these FaceTime appointments. I preferred FaceTime because I don’t like Zoom because you can’t talk at the same time. My first customer, I kid you not, was a lady called Jammie Ring. And I was like, right, okay, this has got to be a joke. I mean, obviously doing this whole thing like putting yourself out to potential weirdos or, you know, not completely dedicated shoppers, shall we say. 

So I was like, oh, right, this is going to be a total joke. So I set up my tripod that I bought my girls for Christmas, which was like a cheapie thing from Amazon. So it’s a bit wobbly, in the room that I’m sitting in now, which became became the kind of work hub of Emmy London during COVID. So it was my dressing room and then became kind of virtual showroom/storeroom. So I did my first appointment. It turns out she wasn’t called Jammie Ring, she was called Jamie Ring. And she was based in the US, she was getting married, she wanted to buy shoes. I said, I don’t really have that many shoes here to show you, but I can do some sketches. And she bought a pair of bespoke shoes. And that was my first FaceTime appointment. And I was like, brilliant. Okay, let’s just do this. So I was doing that every day, all day, whilst my girls were downstairs struggling with online learning. 

And Dickie was here sort of panicking a lot of time. He did sort of come around from the panic and he spent a lot of time reading our website, which in time gave us a lot of acceleration in our revenue and it’s the website that we currently have. So that was a really good, well-spent project.

So yeah, so I was sort of continued selling in that mode. I really enjoyed being back face to face with the customers, learning about what they wanted. I learned so much about streamlining the process of the business. So it almost like reshaped how we function now and it opened up a whole new selling channel that doesn’t have any sort of geographic time zone barriers. So that’s how we survived. It did nearly tip me over the edge, I have to say. I don’t know about anyone else, but I found selling online really exhausting in a way that physical selling is obviously more physically exhausting, but I’d literally have to have a cup of tea and a piece of cake in between each one.

ANNABEL (HOST)

It’s really strange. I think it’s something to do with the screen time and how it can leave you feeling really exhausted, the impact of that screen. Yeah, it’s very, very draining. I feel the same after I’ve done podcasts as well. It’s like, whoa, I actually need to go and have a nap now. It’s definitely a thing, a phenomena. 

EMMY SCARTERFIELD OF EMMY LONDON  (GUEST)

We baked a lot of banana bread, so I’d eat some of that and then be right on to the next one. But I suppose as well, connecting with the customers as well as quite emotional and obviously everyone had their own challenges and there were so many uncertainties and trying to, I suppose, kind of appease that uncertainty and reassure people. Yeah, it took a lot of mental energy.

ANNABEL (HOST)

Yeah, because you’re counselling these people as well as, you know, trying to make a sale effectively, aren’t you?

EMMY SCARTERFIELD OF EMMY LONDON  (GUEST)

Yeah, not a lot of them, but a few of them would have, there would be maybe like a mum and a sister because they were trying to recreate that sort of experience of doing stuff together, which was fascinating, but yeah, really exhausting. But I kind of excelled on that sort of adrenaline requirement, but just the mental stamina. 

Alongside that as well, I used to do these, they started off daily and then they sort of became weekly, but I did these like videos. They weren’t live, but I just filmed myself chatting to the team about what was going on, so they could just look at it when they were ready. But quite often I’d like have wet hair and no makeup and I’d just be like walking around the house kind of going, it’s all right, we told this yesterday, we’re all going to be okay. And, you know, asking what they were doing and stuff like that. So just trying to like keep in touch and reassure them as much as I could, not that I had any of the answers. 

ANNABEL (HOST)

I think you probably did a fantastic job throughout all of that. 

EMMY SCARTERFIELD OF EMMY LONDON  (GUEST)

Well, as a conclusion, I feel like COVID obviously was a massive challenge and rebuilding from that point was slow and scary. But there’s definitely been some positives that have come out of it for us as a business in terms of focus and our processing and our ability to survive. 

But yeah, I can’t deny that it was scary and it took its toll mentally I think on all of us and was a major, major challenge and setback. But you know I have to be thankful that we’re still here.

ANNABEL (HOST)

Yeah, absolutely. I think that we all have to be thankful that we’re still here and from where I’m sat, it looks like you are thriving again, and that you have bounced back as an incredible brand, which is really reassuring to see. 

EMMY SCARTERFIELD OF EMMY LONDON  (GUEST)

The other challenge I wanted to chat about actually was during COVID, my mum got diagnosed with secondary cancer. So that was massive. It was kind of just as we were trying to get the shop open again and things like that. So it came as a massive shock. She’d had breast cancer two years before. And I just sort of, in hindsight, just feel like we were really, really not well educated on the reality of that at all. 

So she had breast cancer, she had the surgery to remove it, she had radiotherapy, she didn’t want chemotherapy but she wasn’t encouraged to have the chemotherapy. So as much as you can, we kind of got through that and sort of forgot about it really. She was really active, she had an allotment, she looked after my granny who lived till she was 99, she lived a normal life. She didn’t really want to be that person that was sort of constantly worried about it coming back. So we didn’t. 

So when she started getting backache and things, we were like, well, you did dig up a tree yesterday, mum. What did you expect? She was only in her late 60s, so she wasn’t old. She was completely fit and healthy. So it didn’t ring any alarm bells, but if I’d known what I know now, it would have rang alarm bells because actually what was happening was the cancer had come back and it was all in her bones and her liver and secondary cancer, there is no cure. So it was just a huge shock during that COVID time. 

So I now kind of have grief, but also kind of piecing together those periods of time where I couldn’t be with my mum and I feel quite a lot of resentment about that, really. And yeah, just that time that we lost, really.

ANNABEL (HOST)

I can imagine that you feel that. I mean, that’s a hugely traumatic thing to have gone through, especially in light of what you’ve just been through.

EMMY SCARTERFIELD OF EMMY LONDON  (GUEST)

Yeah, yeah, on top of that, I suppose, that’s when I was really feeling the challenge of maintaining that mental stamina. So, yeah, so that was a huge shock and a huge adjustment because me and my mum had become very close in sort of my later years. I’d say sort of from just before she was very, she got very involved in planning our wedding. So I think sort of since then we’ve become very close and enjoyed the same things, spent a lot of time together, she came on holiday with us a lot and things like that, so and because she wasn’t old I kind of hadn’t, I wasn’t ready for her not to be in our life, so and also with when someone has that diagnosis it’s really unclear like what’s going to happen and what the treatment is and how long they’ve got and all those kind of things and I suppose you have to become comfortable with the unknown, and in lots of situations you don’t always know and sometimes it’s not always useful to know, which is a massive adjustment, especially when you have your own business, that you feel quite sort of in control of things. 

So that was a big thing for me to accept. But yeah, we only actually, as it turns out, we only had 18 months, just under two years with her. And I did prioritise spending time with her. She lived in Bath, and we’re obviously in London, so I would go every other week and spend the night with her. And so actually, it worked out quite well that I didn’t live around the corner because we probably wouldn’t have had that really quality time together. So we would go for walks, have naps together, knit together, watch TV together, you know, kind of just muddle on, muddle through a couple of days together, you know, with no sort of major events, but it meant that I could completely focus on that and not have to juggle real life whilst doing that. So that’s very, I feel very fortunate that I had that and I don’t have any regrets and going back to my point about freedom, I had the freedom to do that and make that a priority. 

And then when, so she came on holiday with us in the Easter ‘22 and I took a couple of things, extra clothes, thinking I might have to, because she wasn’t well at that point, she wasn’t really able to eat that much, the liver cancer was really starting to impact and so I knew I was going to be taking on a bit of a caring role on that holiday and I packed a few things thinking I might have to kind of stay on a few days when we drop her home until the carer package arrives. The carer package never arrived, so I was her end-of-life carer. So that was six weeks I stayed with my mum. But again, it’s just having that freedom, such a privilege to do that and focus on that. And I actually, I think I was quite good at it. It takes quite a lot of organising, because everyone wants to pitch in and help. So I set up a WhatsApp group with all her friends, which had hilarious moments, and tried, you know, very much kind of staggered and managed the visiting time and things like that, and made a call when that wasn’t appropriate anymore and things like that. 

So I learned a lot about myself, and I suppose as well my mum showed me what death looks like and that it’s not, doesn’t have to be scary or full of doom. You know, that we did have moments of lots of giggling and lots of very gentle time together and she had a very peaceful death, I think, because of what we were able to do and that she was at home. And it turned out that she died on a Sunday morning whilst I was reading Swallows and Amazons, which just happened to be next to her bed and I kind of didn’t even know that she’d gone. She just stopped breathing and I just carried on reading and that was it. It was really un-scary and really un-panicky. So what a privilege.

ANNABEL (HOST)

Indeed, what an incredible privilege. And firstly, I just want to thank you for sharing that story with us because I think sharing these stories, the stories in me are a currency, aren’t they, a currency of communication. And I think that having to experience a loss like that with the whole backdrop of everything that happened a couple of years prior is a huge thing to have gone through and you’ve kind of made it sound less scary. You’ve just, you’ve highlighted what a beautiful privilege it can be spending those final days and weeks with somebody that you love.

EMMY SCARTERFIELD OF EMMY LONDON  (GUEST)

And I think, you know, grief is, grief is really hard that I feel really lucky that I am grieving without any regret or resentment to anyone imposing any of my choices or priorities and because her death was so peaceful, and I totally feel for people that don’t have that experience, I know lots of people don’t have that, but I think grieving sort of peacefully without having the hurdle of getting over traumatic death or not really understanding how that death happened or something like that is a much easier road to travel. But I do feel like a changed person because of that experience. 

ANNABEL (HOST)

I’m sure she was incredibly proud of you. 

EMMY SCARTERFIELD OF EMMY LONDON  (GUEST)

Yeah I think so. She was a bit funny about, I mean she was proud, but she had a very different barometer of success to me, or what I did have maybe before. I think she would have been equally proud of me had I grown my own carrots ,as having the business and I am yet to grow my own carrots. I have grown some courgettes this year that carrots have not, I have not succeeded at. So, but yeah I think that whole approach which wasn’t new was very grounding. I certainly wasn’t going to impress her with growing a massive business. 

But yeah, it was really important for her that we were happy and our girls were happy and that we did wholesome things together. So yeah, just tried to continue that legacy really. 

But grief I have found a very interesting road, really unpredictable. And I know you know grief really well, but for those that don’t, obviously everyone is going to experience it. At some point, it’s inevitable, it is part of life. But it’s an emotion I think that is really undemanding, because it’s very patient. 

ANNABEL (HOST)

And it’s not a linear thing either, is it? It will come and go whenever it wants to come and go and it’ll hit you out of nowhere.

EMMY SCARTERFIELD OF EMMY LONDON  (GUEST)

And all those things that you want to do to celebrate their life and remember them, you don’t have to do all at once. There’s no urgency. So a lot of the things that I would want to do for my mum or to remember my mum, I haven’t done yet but that’s totally fine because grief is patient.

ANNABEL (HOST)

Yeah, I love that. Grief is patient.

EMMY SCARTERFIELD OF EMMY LONDON  (GUEST)

There’s no pressure and there’s no stress because grief, unfortunately, will always be there.

 So, yeah, so when I meet people now, new people, I feel like it’s something that I need to tell them about myself because it’s almost like going on a date and not asking someone’s name. Like, I am grieving.

ANNABEL (HOST)

I think that’s important, because I think people, there’s this stigma isn’t there and an expectation that we are going to be a wreck constantly if we’re grieving. And you can grieve people grieve in such different ways and it’s such different times. And you can be looking like you’re completely holding it together. But grieving constantly behind the scenes and dealing with it in your own way. So I think it’s really important for the person who’s grieving to feel comfortable saying that to whoever they’re around.

EMMY SCARTERFIELD OF EMMY LONDON  (GUEST)

Yeah, I think so. And I think some people may feel uncomfortable with that, but actually, I’m not the same person that I was. So it’s probably better for people to just know that up front.

ANNABEL (HOST)

Has it changed how you liaise with your customers, your clients, because I know there will be a lot of brides listening to this too?

EMMY SCARTERFIELD OF EMMY LONDON  (GUEST)

Because I know there’ll be lots of brides listening to this too. Yeah I have, I have done less of that which has been, not a conscious decision, but I’ve had another life curveball shortly following my mum’s death which has meant that I haven’t had capacity to be face to face with my customers, but when I have done it,  I have found it… I really enjoy it because it’s complete escapism for me, that I have found the mother-daughter dynamic quite triggering in the sense that I… It’s just obviously a reminder that I don’t have that anymore, but I then turn it sort of like that’s what I aspire to have with my girls. 

It requires me to pause my own emotions for a period of time. But right now I’m not able to do that for a long period of time.

ANNABEL (HOST)

Yeah and you talked about a curveball, which I am going to come back to. 

I want to explore a little bit for a little moment, your connection with the brides, because I know, as I said, there’ll be lots of them listening, and I would just want to use this as an opportunity for you to tell them what you love about what you do and to describe to them what’s so magical about your brand because for me it is so special and I think you know there’ll be a lot of brides listening who might not have heard of your brand before and I want to encourage them to go and explore it and you know to visit your website and perhaps maybe book an appointment, but so I just want to move the conversation sensitively over to you, your brand and your style and your aesthetic. Tell me about that.

EMMY SCARTERFIELD OF EMMY LONDON  (GUEST)

My passion and my mission is really about creating beautiful shoes that you’ll be excited, proud to wear on the day, but also can’t wait to wear them again and treasure them. But with the balance of having shoes that tick all of those boxes but actually make you feel really comfortable, confident, and secure whilst you’re wearing them. So one of the things that really was the driving force of me setting up Emmy London and focusing on bridal shoes was the fact that I loved shoes. I had many pairs of high heels but I didn’t find them comfortable. I loved how they made me look and feel, like the elevation of the height. I felt instantly more attractive. I felt more powerful, but I didn’t feel any of those things after half an hour because they were killing me. And the idea of sort of starting out the evening full of all of those positive feelings and then actually not enjoying yourself because you’re in pain, I just was like, there just has to be a better solution. 

So my collection is all about really getting that balance absolutely spot on of having all of those feelings about how you look, but really paying attention to how you feel. So all of my designs are with the comfort in mind and how they fit on your foot, making sure that you can stand, walk, dance confidently for a long period of time because most weddings or events that my shoes are worn at, it’s not just like taxi to table, it’s standing, dancing, walking for like 
12 hours or more. So each design is very much catered for that activity and each design is considered and really thought about in terms of how do we create that and tick both of those boxes. 

So one of the things that I do when I have a new design, I get to wear test my own shoes. So I get to try out mainly because of my shoe size, but obviously I want to make sure personally as well that we are ticking these boxes. So one of the things that I kind of think about when I’m testing out a new style is, could you, if you needed to, could you run for a bus in these shoes? And I think there’s something really reassuring and safe with having that knowledge that if I needed to, I could run for a bus in these shoes.

ANNABEL (HOST)

Do you know what? I love that. And I’m so glad that you’ve spoken about this in comfort because I think it must be an easy thing to say from a marketing perspective. But I own several pairs of your shoes, and by God, that is something. Like, I can’t do heels for any length of time. And I wore your shoes on my wedding day, and that was the one thing I noticed. I put them on in the morning, and I was still wearing them at midnight and I didn’t feel any discomfort. Every pair I’ve got. And I remember you saying to me, it’s all in the detail. And like, you gave this kind of insight that fascinated me about how much time you spent tweaking to the tiny little millimetres worth or whatever size of getting the shape and the cut of the shoe I guess, the structure of the shoe, just perfect.

EMMY SCARTERFIELD OF EMMY LONDON  (GUEST)

Yeah, because shoes are so small as objects, only like the tiniest little imperfection or millimetre here, millimetre there can make a massive difference to the comfort. So we spend a lot of time perfecting like the balance of the shoe, which sounds quite basic, but actually it’s such a science of getting the last, which is the mould that makes the shoe, to sit exactly with the heel. So if there is a perfect balance, then it doesn’t feel like a high heel because your weight is distributed evenly. It’s when it’s like not perfectly balanced, which we have the indulgence of making sure that it is because we don’t change our last and heels every season because we’re not fitting into a fashion agenda, so we can spend the time to perfect that. Fashion brands don’t have that luxury really, because it’s like one season it’s this shape, next season it’s that shape. 

But yeah, when you have an imbalance, then it can put more pressure on the ball of your foot, or you have that feeling, that sense that you’re like tipping back, and all of those feelings, you’re overcompensating all the time and that’s really hard work. So that’s part of why they’re so comfortable and obviously the upper shapes and the materials that we use, the priority is really how does it actually feel on your foot.

ANNABEL (HOST)

All of that, I just find it absolutely fascinating and another thing that stands out to me as well is that you said that you don’t change the shape of your last, which is basically the mould of the shoe that you structure the design of the shoe around, isn’t it? What you use to create the shoe and that’s because you’re not necessarily following trends, you’re creating shoes for you, I guess, that are something that’s going to be timeless and that will stand the test of time from a fashion perspective, will look just as good in 10, 20, 30, 50 years time as they do now.

EMMY SCARTERFIELD OF EMMY LONDON  (GUEST)

Yeah, exactly. I mean, some of our styles go in and out of fashion, but that’s almost coincidental. The basis of really the styling is getting those classic timeless shapes that are delicate and feminine, and getting those silhouettes right that you can wear 10 years ago, but still looks relevant now and then really the aesthetic of the whole brand is really self-indulgent. I just design things that I like and I want to wear and I figure if I like it, probably lots of other people will like it too.

ANNABEL (HOST)

I wouldn’t call it self-indulgent. I’d call that being authentic.

EMMY SCARTERFIELD OF EMMY LONDON  (GUEST)

Yes, and I’m very focused on that and I’ve learned that that is the key to success. Along the way, obviously, over the 20 years, that gap in the market that I spotted all those years ago has been filled with other brands offering to other options. And there have been times where I’ve been a bit frustrated that my designs maybe have influenced their designs, that I kind of learned very quickly that actually, if you spend all your time looking backwards or to the side of what everyone else is doing, you are actually just losing time in moving forward. 

It is frustrating, but it doesn’t really get you anywhere. So I’ve made a conscious decision not to really pay attention to that. I’m just looking forward and creating what I love and that seems to have worked for me.

ANNABEL (HOST)

And I think also, you know, for the brands that are copying you, you don’t really want that kind of bride anyway. You want the kind of bride who’s going to really appreciate the level of craftsmanship that’s going into your shoe design and production.

EMMY SCARTERFIELD OF EMMY LONDON  (GUEST)

Absolutely. I think the bride that buys from us kind of really appreciates all the effort that’s gone into not just how it looks, but how it feels and actually at the end of your wedding celebration, I can bet you any money, what’s the most important thing is that you’ve had fun, you’ve enjoyed it and you’ve not been in pain. 

ANNABEL (HOST)

Yeah, we don’t want brides to be in pain on their wedding day, do we? 

EMMY SCARTERFIELD OF EMMY LONDON  (GUEST)

No, like, pain literally is so unattractive. So, you know, I just think, yes, our shoes are not the cheapest option out there. I recognise that, but you do really get what you pay for.

ANNABEL (HOST)

I can absolutely vouch for that. 

I wanted you to just tell us a little bit about your factory in Porto, because I’ve been really fascinated to see you revealing more about that.

EMMY SCARTERFIELD OF EMMY LONDON  (GUEST)

Yeah, it’s been really interesting, actually, because it’s been such an ongoing discussion within the team because I’m really proud of it and I love going there. Like, I love the noise. I love the smell. I love the process. Like, that for me is like one of the most exciting parts of my job. And I think there have been brands that have presented that story, but in a very polished way and because we identify as a luxury brand, we want to do everything at the best level we can. And so we wanted to try and create a very kind of slick, polished video or something of the workshop and how the shoes are made. But it’s actually really challenging. It’s ot particularly pretty. The machines can look a little bit clunky. You’d have to do a lot of kind of smoke and mirrors to get that story across. 

And then also, you know, it becomes not the most important thing when you’ve got a million other things to do or prioritise on. So we never got around to doing it. So I was going out to the workshop and I was like, well, I’m just going to do it as it is and just see how it comes out and I think it’s really lovely to see the actual people and their, you know, like, they’re not perfect hands and just the reality of it and meet the people that are actually making your shoes. 

ANNABEL (HOST) 

I don’t think there’s a big expectation for the polished kind of content anymore. 

EMMY SCARTERFIELD OF EMMY LONDON  (GUEST)

No, I don’t think there is anymore because I think people can see, I can think they can see the polish. 

ANNABEL (HOST)

Everything’s so accessible now, right? The bigger thing is that there’s a genuine curiosity to see your process and to see how your shoes are crafted. That for me, I didn’t for one minute look at those images or any video and think, wow, that’s not particularly polished or looking, that could have been done better. I was just fascinated to, oh my gosh, we’re meeting the people that I’m obsessed with hands. Like you, I like to see the hands at work and I want to know the provenance of the item I’m potentially going to be investing in, and that really fascinates me. So tell me a little bit about the people you work with then and their level of craftsmanship, because, I mean, creating shoes.

EMMY SCARTERFIELD OF EMMY LONDON  (GUEST)

So the craftsmanship is so high there. So basically, for me, it has all the kind of skill and the legacy of craftsmanship that Italy has, but I have to say without the ego. So they’re very just comfortable to do their thing and with sort of no huge expectations. Also the team that I work with that are really happy and interested in the product and find doing the bespoke orders, for example, really exciting. Whereas I think a lot of workshops or factories would find that challenging in a negative way. 

So I just find that approach and their passion just is really sort of vibrant. What’s really exciting for me is, so when I was there, I haven’t posted it yet, but I’ve done a picture of all the women that work in the workshop and then I’ve got a picture of all the women that work in our London studio and boutique, and just to compare, like, see how many women work in our business, because we essentially, apart from Dickie and a few men in the workshop, we’re essentially all women. So we’re designing for women, by women that know what women want and need. And so this photo was really lovely because it’s like all different ages, shapes and sizes of women that just all have that common thread of just all want to do a good job making these shoes. 

And what’s been really exciting, where shoe production in Portugal, if I had more time and more resource and more money, basically, I would love to set up a shoe kind of enterprise kind of thing in Portugal, because basically a lot of the shoemaking workforce now are grandmas and older parents and a lot of these towns, all of the family dynamic, they all work in shoemaking. And then the younger generation are going off to university and basically wanting to leave the country and do something in technology or something more, what they would deem as more modern and they’re not interested in learning the skills of shoemaking. And my fear is that this whole skill is going to get lost. The younger generation, I feel like they don’t value what they could learn and what they could continue. It’s sort of deemed as a kind of really unattractive career to go into. 

So I sort of my dream would be to set up something where it ignites more passion and more sort of modern technology into that career option to guarantee that you have the next generation engaged.

ANNABEL (HOST)

It’s kind of sad to think that, isn’t it? That those beautiful crafts are…

EMMY SCARTERFIELD OF EMMY LONDON  (GUEST)

It’s really sad and scary. So what’s really exciting for me now and really sort of is a chink of light is that the workshop owner has two daughters and they’ve both just joined the business and so they’re taking over and they’re kind of in their 20s. They’ve gone to university, they’ve done other things and they’ve come back to shoes and so I’m really excited that they are the new generation and they’re women.

ANNABEL (HOST)

It’d be nice to see them get some new apprenticeships through their factory, wouldn’t it?

EMMY SCARTERFIELD OF EMMY LONDON  (GUEST)

Yeah, it really would. Yeah. So, so, yeah. So once I have a little bit more time and resources, it’s something that I really need to focus on because I think there is an opportunity to make a difference.

ANNABEL (HOST)

There was one thing that did make me laugh and I have to mention it, when I was looking at one of your Instagrams. Is it Mario, who’s one of your makers or your head maker?

EMMY SCARTERFIELD OF EMMY LONDON  (GUEST)

Oh, yeah.

ANNABEL (HOST)

And you left a little caption in the Instagram, there’s a picture of you both, it was really sweet. And you’d quoted him and he said, she’s quite bossy, she knows what she wants. But most of all, I love her laugh. 

Are you quite bossy?

EMMY SCARTERFIELD OF EMMY LONDON  (GUEST)

I would say I am quite direct. I don’t know if that would be construed as bossy. I think, definitely in the workshop, you have to kind of own your role there and it would be so easy to be swayed into accepting something that isn’t quite right or not quite what you’re expecting because that’s maybe how they’d always done it. But I’m very much known there for walking in and saying, no, that’s not what I wanted and I know you might have done it a million times like that before, but I’m asking you to do it this way. 

And they’re like, no, no, no, no, no. And I’m like, no, let’s just try it. And we normally get there in the end, but there’s a bit of back and forth, shall we say. And I think in the end, they kind of respect that, that I’m clear about what I want and I stick to it. 

So that might be kind of… Might be like a way that they’re stitching the uppers, or it might be how they’re finishing the soles. Like something quite small that makes a big difference in terms of like the end kind of finish. 

ANNABEL (HOST)

I bet he loves working with you and you have to be like that, and it’s paid off. Your brand is very distinctive for me. I mean, of course, people will always try and copy, but there isn’t any other brand that does what you do. I can instantly tell when it’s an Emmy shoe, for example. So I think that your efforts being a little bit bossy in that factory have definitely paid off.

EMMY SCARTERFIELD OF EMMY LONDON  (GUEST)

Yeah, they can make me a little bit unpopular for half an hour. But then we laugh about something, and then it’s all right. Yeah, over the noise and machinery, I can be heard laughing.

ANNABEL (HOST)

And before I move on to a couple of more personal nature questions, I just want to ask you, do you have a favourite pair of Emmy shoes? A favourite pair of all time?

EMMY SCARTERFIELD OF EMMY LONDON  (GUEST)

Well, I’ve got a few actually. So we did a style, I think you’ve got a pair actually, we did a style called Layla, which is the cutout.

ANNABEL (HOST)

I just love them. I love them. Yeah.

EMMY SCARTERFIELD OF EMMY LONDON  (GUEST)

Love them. And I’m really thinking we need to get them back.

ANNABEL (HOST)

Oh, I wore them on my wedding day, actually, Layla.

EMMY SCARTERFIELD OF EMMY LONDON  (GUEST)

Oh. They’re just such a good design because they’re soft. They’re sexy, but not tarty. I mean, every time I wear them, I’m just like, I had a really good day when I designed these.

ANNABEL (HOST)

That’s great marketing also. Sexy, not tarty.

EMMY SCARTERFIELD OF EMMY LONDON  (GUEST)

Not tarty and they’re just so secure, but because of the cutouts, the construction is really soft. So yeah, so maybe for our 20th year, we’ll bring it back. But it had a moment of we kind of overdid it, and we needed to kind of step away and explore other things.

ANNABEL (HOST)

Do you think that’s partly to do with trends as well? I know you’re not a trend-driven person, but I guess, like you said before, that your designs, I guess they’ll come and go in cycles, will they?

EMMY SCARTERFIELD OF EMMY LONDON  (GUEST)

They come and go in cycles. I think that particular design was very much pigeonholed as kind of like a vintage look and then that became, which was really popular at a certain time, and then became really unpopular and so we kind of had to pull back on that look, but actually as a shoe design, it’s still a winner for me. 

So my favourites, more from current collections is, I’ve got the Colette shoe in various colours and materials, which is just a very simple pointed mule that has the stretch satin straps. So the stretch satin fabric was a real game changer for us so that we could have that kind of ribbony detail that sort of slightly ballerina kind of-esque look, which is super flattering, but also really comfortable because it’s stretch satin, it sort of moves with you. So it also doesn’t come undone. So I’ve got Colettes, a lot of Colettes, and I’ve got a lot of Harriets, which are the sort of older sister with the closed back version. 

And what I was saying earlier about that real appeal for me, for those shoes that I got for my ninth birthday, with having the versatility, that really plays into the Harriet because you can style it in like three different ways and it genuinely looks like a different shoe and so to give the brides, or if you’re having them in another colour for another event, it gives the person such flexibility and sort of personal styling opportunity and you can like dress them up, dress them down and super comfy again.

ANNABEL (HOST)

And there’s something as well about your whole branding, the boxes are beautiful, the way they’re packaged is so beautiful as well. So I love the whole idea of putting them back after you’ve worn them and then getting them out again to wear them for another special occasion. That’s part of it, isn’t it? It’s part of that investment.

EMMY SCARTERFIELD OF EMMY LONDON  (GUEST)

Yeah, the box is based on a champagne box, so it’s definitely designed to be kept.

ANNABEL (HOST)

Emmy, I’m keen to take the conversation just across to learning more a little bit about you and what goes on in your life and I know that you are also mum to two precious twin daughters. 

I’m keen to know how you juggle the demands of being a business owner, hugely successful business owner, and being a mum as well. Are you juggling it? Are you doing it? Are you achieving the holy grail of parenthood?

EMMY SCARTERFIELD OF EMMY LONDON  (GUEST)

Well, I think the juggle is the actual challenge, isn’t it? I don’t think we ever always get it right all of the time. I have become much better at prioritising my time on the business because of sort of events over the last few years has made my role much more specific and much more sort of versatile. I suppose that I have been able to juggle it maybe a little bit better in terms of me being available. 

I’ve found as my girls have got older, it’s become more challenging. I did a lot of sort of travelling for work when they were younger and at primary school and things and I found that much more doable in a way, even though I was terrified of flying and I’d always be thinking, oh my what if, what if, but the actual transferring the care of them to someone else, which would normally be a grandparent, was a much more sort of doable thing. And as they’ve got older, I feel like having teenagers, I need to be way more emotionally available for them and, navigating the meltdowns, and there could be a few a day and just being here, even though they don’t really want to hang out with me now. I just kind of need to be here for them. 

So I haven’t travelled as much since they’ve been at senior school. I mean, obviously, COVID put a stop to all of that, but I haven’t really reestablished that routine because I just feel like their care is not transferable now. I think it would be highly stressful for a grandparent to try and navigate the comings and goings of teenagers and all of their demands. And so, yeah, so I have found it’s evolved definitely and changed as they’ve got older and my business has become more self-sufficient and independent of my time every day, all day. So I can be a bit more specific with what I input.

ANNABEL (HOST)

Do you have any kind of creative outlet away from your work that just gives you a bit of time for you, like in you alone, just to find you time?

EMMY SCARTERFIELD OF EMMY LONDON  (GUEST)

Yeah, so since sort of juggling, like adding grief into the juggle as well, I was sort of realising that I wasn’t, for a really, really long time, I wasn’t doing anything that wasn’t work Emmy, mum Emmy, wife Emmy, sister Emmy, auntie Emmy, like, daughter Emmy. Like, there was no just Emmy time at all. And so I was looking at doing some grief counselling, which was going to happen on Friday, and I was thinking, well, I probably need to take the whole day off work to do that, you know, effectively. And then at the same time, I found out about this woodwork course that is all that’s run by women and for women and it’s about sort of empowering women, you know, to use power tools and make things out of wood, and that also fell on a Friday. 

And so I’d already got my head into the idea that I was going to be taking the whole day off. So I basically just did the woodwork instead of grief counselling. But it’s almost done both because I found it really good to just do something for me. I have really enjoyed meeting other women that I may not have engaged with in my work or mum hat on. And also, it’s kind of, I’ve really enjoyed making things. So I was a bit scared of the whole power tool thing. My dad was really, like, very DIY-y, but was very much like, don’t touch that, that’s dangerous. So I’d never really picked up a drill or anything before. It’s really not that difficult. It’s absolutely fine. 

So I’ve made a few pieces of furniture, which is just so satisfying. They’re not perfect, but totally fine. But most of all, I’ve enjoyed the process. So a lot of the time I’m doing sanding, like with an electric sander, which is just amazing, because you can’t talk because it’s so noisy and you’re just like in your own headspace. And yeah, it’s just quite sort of therapeutic.

ANNABEL (HOST)

Yeah, I was looking at an Instagram post recently where you shared an image of a beautiful table that you’d made, like a low floating table that your family dine on in your beautiful garden. The caption on Instagram was incredibly moving actually, I don’t know if you want, 

I’d like to invite you to talk about that, if you’re comfortable talking about it. 

EMMY SCARTERFIELD OF EMMY LONDON  (GUEST)

So yeah, so the sort of shortly following my mum’s death has been quite intense. After my mum died, in between my mum dying and her funeral, which I organised with my siblings, me, Dickie, Alice and Bea went on holiday to Portugal, which sounds like a weird thing to do, but actually we go to the same place every year, and we’ve been doing that for, like, 12 years or so, and it’s very remote, it’s just our time for the four of us and so actually because I’d been doing all of my mum’s end-of-life care, we really needed just to kind of be the four of us again and kind of just have some down time so we went. It was a bit odd going before her funeral and I kind of felt like I was weirdly leaving her, kind of strange, but then it turned out she came with me. It’s fine. 

So we were, it was about the second day. We were on that holiday and my daughter, one of my daughters said to me. I need to tell you something and I was thinking okay, you know it’s gonna be something really predictable and she said I have a problem and I need help and her problem was that she’d started making herself sick after eating. And I was a bit like, wow, okay, so this is not what I was expecting, or maybe it is what I was expecting and I thought we’d got away with it, because I suppose it’s such a common thing in teenagers, and up until that point we hadn’t been challenged by that. 

And so right there and then, in that moment, I had to box up my grief and put that to one side and deal with this and it was really overwhelming because we were in the middle of nowhere with no Wi-Fi. She didn’t really want me to tell Dickie and she said she wasn’t really that comfortable going out for dinner on the holiday and there’s not really that much else to do. The weather wasn’t great, so I was like, okay, and I just felt like I didn’t really have the brain capacity to process it, but I kind of had to. So I did tell Dickie, because I kind of felt like I needed to share it, and he wanted a lot more information. He likes to have all the facts and figures, which I didn’t have. 

So basically we endured that holiday, and I was aware of her making herself sick. I was just became, it was so obvious, and I couldn’t work out how I hadn’t noticed and then the moment we got home, instead of focusing on my mum’s funeral, I completely focused on navigating where to get help, which is a minefield of closed doors for various reasons. A lot of services haven;t reopened since COVID or they’ve migrated online which I knew weren’t going to be ideal for my daughter. A lot of services aren’t open for her age group, which was really surprising because I thought that was kind of the sweet spot of age. School were not particularly helpful. It was like I was introducing a whole new concept. I thought they would have a very well-trodden path of the next steps and treatment plan and things like that because I assumed they would have had lots of experience of it. They didn’t. 

The GP wasn’t wildly helpful. We didn’t, they’ve still not seen Alice in person. So it was a lot of navigating systems and care services, but not actually making any progress and at this point, Alice was still going to school and she’d come home from school and say, have you found some help yet? And I’d have to say no. So that was just awful. 

We did get help in the end and we’ve tried lots of different treatment approaches. Some have been more successful than others. We’ve done NHS, we’ve done a bit of private and we’ve tried different types of therapies and things. But essentially it has been like having a very toxic lodger move in overnight, uninvited. And it basically strips everything that you are used to as a family dynamic and what you enjoy doing together, which for us, and which is so common in a lot of families of coming together and eating together, being on holiday and eating in restaurants or having people over for food, we did that a lot, or going out for food with friends, all had to stop. And so that kind of bond that you have and sort of social outlet just stopped overnight and meal times became very intense and very arduous and really negative, to the point where I don’t even really like sitting around our kitchen table now anymore, hence why we eat outside on the low table, even if it requires wearing a jumper. 

So, yeah, so it’s just been a really difficult year of kind of putting grief on hold, which is doable to a certain degree. Maintaining a business and maintaining growth, but doing it from a very kind of offhand way and Dickie has had to fill in a lot of the roles that I would normally play day to day. So he’s had to sort of navigate that. 

The team have had to become very empathetic to a situation that is not anything they really know about and is quite private and they’ve had to become very self-sufficient again. And for the last six months, I’ve basically been at home looking after my daughter. So she’s not been in school since November now. She starts a hospital school in September, which will be a very slow transition, but it is light at the end of a long tunnel of a sort of level of normality or structure. 

But she has been a really amazing patient and daughter and really receptive to help. I think the fact that she asked for help is a massive breakthrough. So she has been a delight to look after, I have to say. So, and it’s given us a lot of time together to learn about each other. But it has been scary at times, and it’s been really frustrating at times, and it’s taken a lot of energy and my time kind of trying to stay on track and just even join up all the services really. 

So that’s sort of pushed my skill set and my experience. And again, it goes back to that notion of kind of not having that level of control that when you have your own business, you work really hard at something or you throw money at something or there’s normally a way that that you can navigate it to your own benefit. But with this, it’s been very much, we’re on a journey and there’s no set plan and the only sort of certainty, I suppose, and which has taken a massive level of acceptance is time. Time is going to be healer and there is no expectation of that time. You know, lots of people ask how she’s doing, but progress and recovery is not linear. So it’s really hard to answer that in a really straightforward way because there’s definitely progress, but it’s hard to identify sometimes. 

So yeah, so it’s been hugely challenging for all of us, not just for my daughter, not just for me, but for Dickie, for my other daughter, and for our wider family really, and friends. I think it’s quite confusing for her friends, and we’ve been really lucky in the sense that parents haven’t kind of said, oh, maybe don’t be friends with her anymore. We’ve had a lot of support and encouragement and drive to continue relationships, but yeah I just feel very sad that she has missed out on a lot of fun and growing up years that she’ll have to catch up on really. 

And we still don’t really know you know how this is going to evolve or how this lands really or when it lands and I suppose it’s been a really interesting and important lesson of, you set off on one path and you look at kind of life cycle and there are various things that you tend to assume are going to happen next, this whole journey has made me realise that actually to let go of those expectations and assumptions is the most powerful thing you can do because you really don’t know how it’s going to pan out. And to open your mind to that is, actually gives you a lot of freedom. 

ANNABEL (HOST)

Yeah, and we spoke prior to hitting the record button, didn’t we, about taking every day, sometimes even every hour and I’m sure there are moments where you’re reducing it down to even less than that. Just getting through those chunks, you know, and getting to the end of the day and just taking a moment to think, I’ve got to the end of the day. I did it. We’re here. We’re all together. We’re loving each other, you know. 

And the other thing that strikes me about your daughter, who must be such a strong individual, such a strong individual to have come to you and asked for that help. I admire that so much because I, not going to talk about it now, but I have had my own addiction issues in the past and I think the biggest, the biggest thing you need to get over is to actually want to be in that place where you can seek help or you want help, and to not be afraid to ask for the help and to hear that she did that and that she came to you is a good thing and I think that she’s lucky to have you both as parents supporting her on, through this part of her life, you know? 

EMMY SCARTERFIELD OF EMMY LONDON  (GUEST)

Yeah, no, I think that’s been, yeah, a major point really that we’ve been so thankful for because actually she could have hidden that for years from us. 

ANNABEL (HOST)

Takes incredible strength, I think. 

EMMY SCARTERFIELD OF EMMY LONDON  (GUEST)

Yeah, she’s put herself in a very vulnerable place, but yeah, we are definitely getting there, but it’s been quite a journey. Yeah just not sure when it’s going to, do journey’s ever end, I don’t know. It’s been interesting in the sense that it’s been so intense and you can tell by when I talk about it it’s very emotional, but what makes me kind of slightly smile is I can be doing all of that, but I can still, you know, I’m still totally involved aesthetically on what is being produced at work. We’ve still managed to do a new collection. I’m still nitpicking at photos that may go out on Instagram, you know, so the wave and kind of the measure of what’s important is sometimes so in flux through my day, but somehow I’ve kind of managed to keep both in check.

ANNABEL (HOST)

And you’ve also learned an incredible new skill. You can make tables now. I can make tables and use power tools.

EMMY SCARTERFIELD OF EMMY LONDON  (GUEST)

I can cook after a sick person. And actually it’s been interesting because the end of life care that I did for my mum was in fact a really good foundation for what I’ve had to do this year. So if I hadn’t have done that, I probably would have been less equipped or less confident to do what I’ve done.

ANNABEL (HOST)

Yeah, Emmy, we’re coming towards the end of the conversation now and I can’t even really truly find the words because you’ve shared so much with me and it’s been such a fascinating and insightful conversation. 

But I do want to ask you, if you were to look back on your life and career now, was there a single piece of advice that you’d give to your younger self?

EMMY SCARTERFIELD OF EMMY LONDON  (GUEST)

Yeah, interesting question. I think time. I think when I was younger, I was like a racehorse in a box, you know, before they set off. And, you know, wanted everything now, all at once. I was going to do it all. And that energy and drive is amazing, and it did get me where I am. But actually, there is no rush, and you don’t have to have everything at the same time. 

Time is the most precious thing. Time with people you love, time with yourself, time to work out what you actually think and want, time to work out what’s important. And when you’re a racehorse in the stalls, I think they’re called, you don’t give yourself that time. And so my older self is definitely valuing time more.

ANNABEL (HOST)

Emmy, I just want to say thank you so much. Thank you so much for making time to chat with me today. It’s been a beautiful conversation and I’ve enjoyed every moment of it. Thank you.

EMMY SCARTERFIELD OF EMMY LONDON  (GUEST)

Well, thank you so much for having me. I hope it has been interesting. I feel like I’ve just sort of opened my heart and just gone, bleugh, but I hope it was interesting and I hope it has been inspiring for some.

ANNABEL (HOST)

I hope very much that you enjoyed this conversation, but before we wrap this episode, I need to ask a favour. 

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