Lauren Roe has been in the business of selling lovely bed sheets and linen for the past decade. During that time, her online homewares brand I Love Linen has successfully kept customers coming back for more while continuing to expand. We picked Lauren’s brain to find out how she keeps her designs fresh, how she sets her biz apart from the countless other bedding brands out there, and what business advice she’d give her past self.

How did your business begin and what do you do there? I’m the creative director and founder of I Love Linen. I mainly focus on our brand and product design, but as any business owner may attest, I also tend to do lots of other jobs! I started the business 10 years ago (which sometimes feels crazy). My family worked in retail, and I remember helping pack boxes and being in their shops from as young as five years old. My dad had always wanted me to eschew retail for a more corporate job, which I did for a while, until I ended back up in retail!

Over the course of your career, what’s the most significant thing you’ve learnt about running a successful business? Growth is not easy. We are indeed successful and continue to grow, but each phase comes with a whole new set of challenges. You’re going to have to be able to pivot, problem-solve and live in mess to some degree if you’re aiming for success.

I wish I had been optimistic about the business growing and set up the systems and processes for that at an early stage, even with a smaller team. It could have minimised growing pains when we did experience very exciting, rapid growth.

How do you decide what your product’s next colours and styles will be? I plan my range about a year in advance, but I will sometimes chop and change things. It’s always based on intuition and what I love, with the hope that if I love it, others will too. We also look at design trends and best-selling colours in our range, and plan for colours that complement those.

When you specialise in one thing for many years, like linen, how do you keep it interesting to new customers and returning customers? I’ve never struggled to come up with new designs or ideas overall, thankfully. In fact, I usually have too many for the team to handle! We have a really high repeat customer rate, which is so humbling as I suppose that means what we create benefits our customers’ lives.

What was popular 10 years ago isn’t so much now, though, so I always keep a read on what is happening in the interiors space. If there is a trend I align with, I will lean into that too.

What does a day in the life of a founder and creative director look like? I go out on photoshoots about once a week, concepting new ranges or concepting photoshoot ideas. I could also be looking at possible shoot locations, models or styling ideas.

A lot of my time is now spent connecting with creatives all around the world as we build our new journal. It’s been such a pleasure talking to architects in Spain, Villa owners in Italy, Florists in London and vintage-store owners in Mexico, for example. I feel so genuinely lucky to call that part of my daily job!

Then there are all the very important and business-oriented jobs, such as reviewing budgets, sales, social media statistics and planning our business strategy.

What strategies do you use to set yourself apart from other homewares brands? I have never sacrificed the quality of our fabric and I get it tested independently to ensure it’s the best weight for linen. It’s easy to cut costs on fabric, and if it looks good in the photos, how can a customer know the quality? But I have family-business values instilled in me and will never change the construction of the linen.

When you feel like you’re lacking inspiration and creativity, what do you do? Stretch, meditate or do 15 minutes of yoga to literally reset my neural pathways and be able to tap into a different part of my brain again.

How many team members does it take to run a business like I Love Linen? We sit at around 12 people. In the business months leading up to Christmas, we will have even more members in the team to pack and ship orders. My partner also works in the business with me, which is good and not so good some days if all I talk about is work.

If you could travel back in time to when you had only just started I Love Linen, what advice would you tell yourself? That your business is going to be very successful and you need to have more structure in place so that when growth happens, you and your team will hopefully be able to charter those waves more easily.

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