Samantha Cameron’s clothing brand Cefinn suffers losses of £2.6m

theguardian.com:

Samantha Cameron’s clothing brand, Cefinn, has just released figures that show cumulative losses amounting to nearly £2.6m as of last October.

The brand, which makes floral dresses regularly worn by the Duchess of Cornwall and midi-skirts favoured by TV royalty Holly Willoughby, is for many inextricably linked to Cameron’s political ties – it is unlikely an accident that Sienna Miller wore Cefinn for her role as disgraced politician’s wife in Anatomy of a Scandal.

For some, Cameron’s political ties will have been off-putting enough to make the clothes undesirable from the get-go. For others, the designs were good enough to overcome that association. When the brand launched in 2017, the Guardian’s Jess Cartner-Morley summed it up in her verdict of the first collection: “I will still never forgive Samantha Cameron’s husband for calling that referendum, but I would definitely wear some of these clothes.”

Support for the Tory party has taken several further batterings since. Plus shoppers have increasingly begun to wield wallets in line with their values – a 2017 survey found that 57% of global consumers buy, or boycott, products because of a brand’s stance on political or social issues.

But Cameron’s connections have also been a help. Both in concrete terms – in 2018 Cefinn received a £2.5m cash injection from the investment firm of Tory donor David Brownlow. And in soft power terms – it can’t hurt that her sister is a former deputy editor of Vogue.

Perhaps the brand’s biggest challenge, however, has been the changing habits of dress brought about by changing habits of work. “The pandemic – having disrupted how everyone works and changed office dress codes forever – has all but killed the need for this