A London-based fashion company, founded in 1973, that runs the womenswear brand Monsoon and the accessories brand Accessorize.
Monsoon Accessorize runs two British fashion brands. Monsoon sells women's and girls' clothing, and Accessorize sells fashion accessories such as bags, jewellery and scarves. The group has sold through its own shops in towns and cities across the UK, and through its websites and other retailers. In the year to August 2018 it operated 181 UK stores, though the number has changed since then.
The company was founded in London in 1973 by Peter Simon, a former market-stall trader, who opened the first Monsoon shop on Beauchamp Place that May. Accessorize followed in 1984 with a first shop in Covent Garden, right next door to Monsoon. The group was listed on the stock market in 1998 and returned to private ownership in 2007. In 2020, during the pandemic, it went through administration and was bought by its founder, and the plan included closing 35 UK stores. We did not find a mission or values statement in the sources we read, so we have not invented one.
The group is headquartered in London. Its head office, in Notting Dale, was designed by the architects Allford Hall Monaghan Morris and has been in use since 2009; it houses an art collection of about 300 works. Overseas it has had stores in countries such as Italy, which brought in £62m of its £296m turnover in 2018. We did not find a current headcount or a list of its distribution sites in the sources we read.
One clear sign of the company's values is the Monsoon Accessorize Trust, a registered charity set up in 1994 to help under-privileged women and children in Asia. Beyond that, the public record shows some lessons too. In 2015 HM Revenue and Customs named the company for underpaying 1,438 UK workers by making deductions for mandatory clothing, and it was fined. The details are public, and they are a useful reminder that large employers are held to account on basic pay rules. As for day-to-day culture, we did not find first-hand accounts.
People in a business like this work in design and buying, merchandising, store management and sales, visual merchandising (planning how windows and shop floors look), marketing, e-commerce and finance. Because the group has been through change in recent years, check its website for the latest picture of the brands, stores and teams. It can be a good first look at how a long-established British fashion business operates across both clothing and accessories.
Website: www.monsoon.co.uk
PURPOSE helps school and university students explore 62 sectors and over 1,000 entry-level careers in the UK, then connects them directly with employers.
Explore PURPOSE