Laura Ashley CBE, (7 September 1925 – 17 September 1985) was a Welsh designer. She became a household name on the strength of her work as a designer and manufacturer of a range of colourful fabrics for clothes and home furnishings. Her legacy lives on today and the Laura Ashley online store has ensured that the Laura Ashley brand will endure.

History

Born Laura Mountney in Station Terrace in Dowlais, Merthyr Tydfil, Laura was raised in a civil service family as a strict Baptist. The chapel she attended in Dowlais (Hebron) was Welsh language and although she could not understand the language, she loved it, especially the singing. Educated at Marshall's School in Merthyr Tydfil until 1932, she was then sent to the Elmwood School, Croydon. She was evacuated back to Wales, and after attending the Aberdare Secretarial School, she left school at 16. In the Second World War, she served in the Women's Royal Naval Service, and then from 1945 to 1952 as a secretary for the National Federation of Womens Institutes in London. She met engineer Bernard Albert Ashley, latterly Sir Bernard, at a youth club in Wallington, and she married him in 1949.

While working as a secretary and raising her first two children, part-time she designed napkins, table mats and tea-towels which Bernard printed on a machine he had designed in an attic flat in Pimlico, London. The couple had invested £10 in wood for the screen frame, dyes and a few yards of linen. Laura's inspiration to start producing printed fabric came from a Women's Institute display of traditional handicrafts at the Victoria & Albert Museum. When Laura looked for small patches carrying Victorian designs to help her make patchworks, she found no such thing existed. Here was an opportunity, and she started to print Victorian style headscarves in 1953.

Audrey Hepburn inadvertently sparked the growth of one of the world's most successful fashion and home furnishing companies. Hepburn appeared alongside Gregory Peck in the 1953 film Roman Holiday, wearing a headscarf. As such a fashion icon, she instantly created a style that became popular around the globe.

The Ashleys' scarves quickly became successful with stores, retailing both via mail order and high street chains such as John Lewis - Bernard left his city job to print fabrics full time. This put them on the road to becoming an international company with a brand that is recognized around the globe. Laura designed the prints and Bernard built the printing equipment; Laura remained in charge of design until shortly before her death, while Bernard handled the operational side.

Employing staff to cope with the growth of sales, the company was originally registered as Ashley Mountney (Laura's maiden name), Sir Bernard changed the name to Laura Ashley because he felt a woman's name was more appropriate for the type of products.

The newly formed company moved to Kent in 1955, but the business was nearly wiped out in 1958, when the river Derwent overflowed - leaving equipment, dyes and fabrics floating in three feet of water. Turnover rose from £2,000 to £8,000 in 1960, and in light of the birth of the third of their four children, the family moved to Wales in 1961, the country where Laura was born and had spent much of her childhood. Originally located in the social club in Carno, Montgomeryshire; in 1967 the factory moved across to the village's railway station.

These were crucial times in the development of the company - Bernard had developed his flat-bed printing process to produce 5,000 metres of fabric per week, and in 1966 Laura produced her first dress for social rather than work attire. The long length silhouette became the Laura Ashley trademark. It also was to work successfully in the company's favour as fashion switched from the mini to the maxi skirt at the end of the 1960s - a newspaper suggested that by donning a Laura Ashley number, women could look as beautiful as Katharine Ross in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

By 1970, sales had reached £300,000 per year. The first shop under the Laura Ashley name opened in Pelham Street, South Kensington, in 1968, with additional shops opened in Shrewsbury and Bath in 1970. In one week alone, London's Fulham Road shop sold 4,000 dresses - which resulted in the new factory in Newtown, Montgomeryshire. It was the opening of the Paris shop in 1974 which was the first to feature the distinctive green frontage and stripped wooden interior, and in the same year the first USA shop opened in San Francisco. A licensing operation led to the opening of department store concessions in Australia, Canada and Japan from 1971 onwards.

By 1975, turnover was £5million per year and the company employed 1,000 people worldwide. Laura turned down the offer of an OBE (she was upset Bernard had not been offered one) but a Queen's Award for Export was accepted in 1977. Turnover reached £25million as Laura Ashley celebrated its 25th anniversary in 1979 with the launch of a range of perfume. The addition of a home in France enabled Laura to go back to her roots of fabric design, and the company launched its home furnishings collections.

In 1985, on her 60th birthday, while she was visiting her children in the UK, Laura fell down the stairs and was taken to hospital in Coventry, West Midlands, she died 10 days later. She is buried in the churchyard of St John the Baptist, in Carno, Powys, Wales. Two months after Laura's death in 1985, Laura Ashley Holdings plc went public in a flotation that was 34 times oversubscribed. The 1980s saw the knighthood of Sir Bernard Ashley, and the launch of additional child and home furnishings ranges. Sir Bernard died on 14 February 2009 after a long battle with cancer.

First of the new CEOs

In the early 1990s, Laura Ashley plc was suffering from a combination of over expansion of its retail outlets and dependence on what had become an overly complex and costly outsourced network of manufacturers. In 1991, American James Maxmin, Ph.D. became the CEO at Laura Ashley, after pressure on the autocratic Sir Bernard. Over the next two and a half years, Dr. Maxmin led a series of changes, fixing problems in manufacturing and logistics that foreshadowed principles of his later book, The Support Economy, co-authored with his wife, Harvard Business School Professor Shoshana Zuboff. For example, he entered into a strategic alliance with FedEx, forming a sort of proto-federation, aimed at improving distribution for close to 500 Laura Ashley stores. The alliance was established as a 10-year partnership, but it was relatively open-ended, premised on trust. The objective was to be able to supply 99 percent of Laura Ashley's merchandise to customers anywhere in the world within 48 hours. The alliance replaced a legacy system that would route a T-shirt manufactured in Hong Kong to a warehouse in Newton, Wales, before sending it to a retail store in Japan.

In 1992, Dr. Maxmin led Laura Ashley to its first gross profits since 1989, and in fiscal 1993, gross profits were expected to reach 12 million pounds. But in early April 1994, two weeks before his wife's epiphany on national television, Dr. Maxin abruptly resigned from Laura Ashley, citing major differences with Sir Bernard over strategy.

Laura Ashley celebrated its 40th anniversary in 1993, the same year that Sir Bernard retired as chairman and became honorary life president. The Ashley family retain an interest in the business and its development. The launch of a children's range and a furniture range helped deflect the looming crisis but by 1997, after a torrid few years and numerous chief executives, the company was in serious financial difficulties.

In May 1998, MUI Asia Limited became a major shareholder in Laura Ashley Holdings plc and under the new management, this world famous international brand was back in profit. Rescued from the receivers in 1998, 58 per cent of the shares are believed to be controlled directly or indirectly by the company's chairman Dr Khoo Kay Peng.

But the company failed to capitalise on its trademark look - probably due to employing its 11th chief executive in 14 years. It closed its flagship store on London's Regent Street in late 2005 because of rent increases

Ms Lillian Tan, who has been chief executive since January 2009, plans to reduce fashion from 22 per cent of sales to 14 per cent this year - with stores cutting back the space they give to clothes in favour of home furnishings, now the most profitable part of the business.

The Laura Ashley brand is now represented in the USA largely through licensing agreements. All of its stores there have now closed and the business as a whole is separately owned from that of its parent company in the UK.