An online nightwear retailer set up by a husband and wife team has made £2.3m in its first year in business after a lockdown boom in demand for pyjamas. Charlotte Hawthorne, a former buyer for fashion brands including Boohoo, I Saw It First and Matalan, came up with the idea for Night with husband Daniel while on holiday in Spain in early 2019.
Within days the Macclesfield-based couple had registered a domain, designed a range of pyjamas and bought £3,000 worth of stock, and in June 2019 sold their first product. By September 2020 they had both left their jobs and for their first full year of trading, to the end of April 2021, recorded sales of £2.3m with £800,000 net profit.
The impressive growth has largely been fuelled by a successful partnership with ASOS, as well as celebrity endorsements from the likes of Gemma Collins and Rosie Fortescue. The company, whose strapline is “luxury nightwear for everybody”, aims to be size-inclusive and caters for sizes 6 to 28.
Daniel, who has a background in business development and marketing, said the company had definitely benefited from the demand for more informal clothing while people were confined to their homes during lockdown, but that many of those new habits were here to stay. “There’s definitely been a shift in the way people are going to be working going forward – smart pyjamas are not going to be going away any time soon. We see from the number of people who tag us on Instagram that people love wearing our pyjamas in work meetings!”
Night has now added a matching mum-and-child set of pyjamas and is also planning to move into menswear and slippers. It has recently hired its first full-time employee and also works with a network of consultants and freelancers.
