When Cécile Reinaud sold Seraphine, her maternity wear brand, to Mayfair Equity Partners, a private equity firm, for £50 million in December 2020, she breathed a sigh of relief.
The deal allowed her to exit the business after running it for 18 years, netting her £20 million in the process, and would give her senior staff the opportunity to step up and take the reins. She had recently installed a new chief executive, David Williams, to run Seraphine alongside Chelsey Westwood, the company’s longstanding chief creative officer.
The company was in rude health. In the financial year to April 2021, it had sales of nearly £34.2 million and a pre-tax profit of £5.6 million. Reinaud had started the company in 2002 after spotting a gap in the market for stylish maternity wear. Its positioning as “affordable luxury” with stylish designs earned it high-profile customers including the Princess of Wales, Gwen Stefani, the singer, and Kate Winslet, the actress.
The Duchess of Cambridge wearing Seraphine in 2018 while pregnant with Louis
NEIL MOCKFORD/GETTY IMAGE
Reinaud was satisfied that she was leaving her brand in good hands. Mayfair Equity Partners had previously backed Ovo, the energy group, and it has invested in other high-profile British companies including Tangle Teezer, the haircare brand.
The Seraphine deal did not pan out how Reinaud had hoped. The business collapsed into administration this month and all 95 staff lost their jobs — notified on a Zoom call, several hours after the Financial Times reported on Seraphine’s failure. Reinaud took to LinkedIn, saying she was “heartbroken” by the news and blaming Mayfair Equity Partners for Seraphine’s demise.
Speaking to The Sunday Times, Reinaud, 51, described Mayfair’s mismanagement of the business as a “catastrophic failure”.
She said: “I feel like, you know, to destroy so fast, such a kind of crown jewel of British fashion is extremely sad, and the worst is the betrayal of people who worked for decades in the business.”
A tipping point was when Seraphine was listed on the London Stock Exchange at a valuation of £150 million in July 2021, a little over six months after the deal with Mayfair Equity Partners was completed.
Reinaud said: “When I heard in May 2021 that they were doing a roadshow to do an IPO [initial public offering], I was extremely surprised because I felt like the business wasn’t ready for this. And for a management team who had just gone through a demanding sale process to then put them through a roadshow felt like bad planning.” Reinaud added that she was “flabbergasted” by the valuation.
As Reinaud watched from the sidelines, Westwood played an integral role in the investor roadshow. She had a newborn baby boy, Humphrey, whom she used to take to the meetings and jokes that he became “the mascot of the IPO”. Although Westwood found the process “tough” she said it was also “empowering” that she could be on the board of a company that was about to float on the stock market while taking care of a newborn baby. “I thought it was so groundbreaking,” said Westwood, 39.
Chelsey Westwood, chief creative officer, at the time of the ill-fated IPO
The listing quickly soured. Having floated with “Bump” as its stock market ticker, Seraphine raised £56 million from investors before nosediving in value, prompting profit warnings. Mayfair bought back the brand for £15.3 million two years later.
Rallying the team to try to turn the business around at this point was like fighting a losing battle, Westwood said. “I started to speak up [to Mayfair] and say, ‘This is ridiculous, we need to slow down. We have a broken team, everybody is very fragile.’ I had the executive team coming to me saying that they were nearing burnout.”
The relationship became fractious, as the private equity firm was pushing an agenda of global expansion to try to grow sales, Westwood says. “The business was on fire and I wanted to get back to the basics of serving our customers, not, ‘let’s try more big things’.”
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It is understood that Mayfair invested about £20 million trying to get the business back on track but, as the turnaround plans faltered, a restructuring last year resulted in 12 staff being made redundant and Williams replaced by Jonathan Brown, the former chief executive of Joules, the clothing company. Westwood was fired in April 2024, after being asked to head straight to the private equity firm’s offices from the airport after a family holiday.
Westwood says she was then dismissed by Bill Ronald, chairman of Seraphine. Westwood says she “left the building shaking”. She plans to take the firm to an employment tribunal with an initial hearing due in September. Her claims include unfair dismissal, discrimination, harassment and whistleblowing detriment.
Westwood was upset by the way she was dismissed by the company
Losses at Seraphine continued to widen. Accounts filed two months late at Companies House on June 23 showed an operating loss of £13.1 million on sales of £41.6 million for the year to March 2024. The same month as the accounts became available, the company announced that it was looking for a new owner, a process that Reinaud described as a “fire sale”. On July 7 the consultancy firm Interpath was appointed as the administrator. It will initially try to rescue the business by selling it, or parts of it. If that is not possible, Seraphine will be closed down and its assets will be sold.
Will Wright, the UK chief executive of Interpath and joint administrator of Seraphine, said on Friday that the administrator was “working through a lot of interest as we explore options for the business … and hope to wrap up the process soon”.
Reinaud said she had “a great experience” with Bridgepoint, Seraphine’s previous private equity owner, which bought a majority stake at a valuation of £20 million in 2017.
“This is not about saying to entrepreneurs ‘don’t go with private equity’ because that’s not fair,” she said. “In any industry, you have the good, the bad and the ugly. But here we have a prime example doing all the things that a private equity [firm] should not do.”
Reinaud says she accepted the inevitable after seeing last year’s figures. “The loss from 2024 was huge.” This, in addition to the earlier “termination” of Westwood, meant Reinaud was “certain” that she was about to witness the downfall of the brand she started 23 years before.
Mayfair Equity Partners said: “We are very proud of the teams we back. Cécile founded an incredible business and beloved brand, brought to life by Chelsey’s creativity.
“The retail landscape is fundamentally more challenging than when we made our original investment, and we are deeply saddened that the amazing efforts of the people we backed with significant capital to revitalise Seraphine were not enough. We are hopeful that Seraphine’s talented team will swiftly find new positions.”
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