This Friday Underlines chats to Mary Geraghty, Founder of the Émerje swimwear brand. In the midst of juggling life as a busy mum of two young daughters and working as a lawyer, she was diagnosed with Stage 3 breast cancer. Thankfully after a long course of treatment, she emerged on the other side and has created swimwear for women like herself – women who wanted garments that allowed and inspired them to feel like themselves again.
Life before Émerje?
My route to launching this collection has been a circuitous one but in a strange way, I feel that everything that has happened has in some way led to this point.
I trained as a lawyer, but my passion has always been fashion and beautiful fabrics. I have enjoyed sewing and designing clothes ever since I was a teenager. I have been lucky to have been able to combine my passions with my career as a lawyer. For a number of years I worked for Harrods and Kurt Geiger which involved supporting the UK launches for fashion and luxury goods within Harrods and also gave me an insight into the design and manufacturing process for shoes. I then moved across to Arcadia Group where I headed up the legal team for the Arcadia brands which included Topshop, Topman, Miss Selfridge and Wallis. As a team we worked on growing the brands in the US and internationally and had regular contact with the in-house designers working to both protect our own designs and trademarks and to defend claims brought by other brands against us.
Why the world of swimwear? Tell us more about your brand
I spend every summer on the island of Belle Ile en Mer (“Beautiful Island in the Sea”) off the West Coast of France. I have always admired swimwear that I see women of all ages, shapes and sizes wearing on the beaches here – understated, elegant and timeless. After completing a long and gruelling year of treatment for breast cancer (chemotherapy, mastectomy and radiotherapy) I came out here to spend some time together as a family, swim in the sea and regain my body and mind.
Every day I swam and became stronger but I struggled to find beautiful swimwear which allowed me to feel like me again and which had the functionality to take a breast form or was secure enough for me to confidently go without. I began designing a collection of swimwear, timeless and understated for women who might be going through any one of a number of changes in her life but which was designed thoughtfully to include women after breast surgery. I had a list of ‘must haves’:
- soft, supportive fabrics – feel secure
- soft moulded cups – shape and smooth out asymmetry
- discrete pockets – give the option to wear a prosthesis or bra pad
- different coverage preferences & UV protection
- no underwiring
What is different about working in this sector?
Without a shadow of a doubt the biggest challenge is fit. Every woman’s body is different. The way we feel about different parts of our body is different and our tastes are of course all different. We like different colours, we all like to accentuate, show off or cover different parts of our bodies but even harder than that is that our body shapes are all so different. The Émerje collection has been designed with post-surgery women specifically in mind. Surgery, radiotherapy, hormone treatment, menopause and pregnancy all cause changes to our bodies – changes which may take us time to get used to and accept. We may feel like we want to conceal bits of our bodies we have previously been confident with or we may just feel that we need different coverage or support.
A Typical Week in your life
I am still practising as a lawyer but for a small number of my own clients. At the moment I am working 50/50 on meeting the needs of my clients with launching Émerje. I also have a husband, two teenage daughters and a spaniel in the house and this adds to the weekly juggle.
Émerje Swim Classic Square Red
Those Special Moments in your career & your proudest moment to date?
The highlights of my legal career have probably been opening Topshop in the US, dealing with the Kate Moss x Topshop collaborations that were huge for a few years, working on the opening of the most beautiful flagship roastery/experiential Starbucks store in central Milan when I was working for Starbucks and seeing the careers of the young lawyers in my team develop and thrive.
I am so proud of how far I have come with Émerje – from a dream and idea in my head 18 months ago to a small collection that I am really happy with and which I really think will make a difference to women who have gone through such a fundamental life change.
The initial feedback I have received from women who have tried the samples has been both phenomenal and humbling. It just feels so wrong that there has been so little choice and so little of quality and beauty available to women who have undergone these changes to their bodies. I have heard from women who say that they have looked for 30 years for swimwear which they would enjoy wearing since having a mastectomy. Whenever pursuing this project has been hard, these are the stories that have kept me going.
My priority now is to get the brand out there, build awareness of the brand and make the pieces available to women that need it. I am hoping that my proudest moment is yet to come!
Any idea where you will be in 10 years time? Any plans for further extension into other sectors?
I have so many ideas and ambitions for the brand. I have further designs at sample stage which I would like to progress and there are so many beautiful fabrics – other colours and textures – available which I would love to be able to use and develop.
Some of the samples which I have not taken forward for the Émerje collection have been snapped up by my teenage daughters and their friends who have been asking me to make them up in different colours. That’s another stage in life where girls’ bodies are changing and where they are looking for a big more coverage than the small triangles/strings that are available on the high street – both to be able to be more active and because they feel less self-conscious. We shall see!!
What are your greatest challenges?
Fit, production and capital.
Not every brand of swimwear will fit or work for every woman. I also know that trying on swimwear is something that many women do not enjoy. For this reason, I’d like to work with lingerie and swimwear specialist stores which really focus on service and fit and who want to help their customers find swimwear which will bring them joy for many years to come. I do also want to do the best I can to communicate sizing and fit to customers who buy online. As a small brand, I’d love to chat to potential customers, get to know them and help them find a fit which works best for them.
Capital and production are both challenging for new brands. I want to launch the brand sustainably and ensure that my production meets demand. The pieces are all made in Italy but my minimums are much smaller than the bigger more established brands. I do believe in buying less and buying well and one way to both encourage this and manage the production/demand balance is to take pre-orders from customers for limited production runs. I appreciate that this takes a shift in mindset from where we have been in recent years – able to click now and have product delivered to our homes a few hours or a day later. I do think however, that for clothing and fashion to be sustainable, we need to get used to buying less; buying more thoughtfully and this inevitably may mean waiting for something we want or accepting that production runs are more limited.
Émerje Swim
The one product you cannot live without?
Good sunscreen. I am a big fan of Altruist which was developed by a consultant dermatologist who believed that sunscreen should not be a luxury. What he developed has everything in it which is needed for top quality skin protection but no fragrances or other chemicals which are superfluous. The brand is very reasonably priced – deliberately so. We are a very outdoorsy family and spend the summer swimming and outdoors as much as possible. At the start of each summer I buy two large 1litre bottles of sunscreen which I place in each bathroom – these keep the family going all summer.
My two luxuries are vintage linen sheets which I pick up in the markets here in France and Diptyque Citronella & Geranium summer body spray – the scent of summer evenings in a bottle!
Time out?
Juggling family, launching Émerje and working with my existing legal clients means that I don’t have much free time. However, the one complete luxury I do have, which I appreciate every day is the simple home we have here on the island of Belle Ile en Mer. We get out here during every school holiday and when we are here, we are surrounded by sea and nature – it is a complete escape and antidote from the pace of life in London. I swim in the sea all year around – before breakfast and at the end of the day. In summer I get around on my 30 year old bike which I adore. Life is simple and I have everything I need when I am here.
Pet Hate?
This may sound strange but since going through breast cancer there is really very little, if anything which annoys me or makes me angry. Life is just too short. I have learnt to see the positives in everything and to let the negatives blow over me.
Émerje Swim Classic Black Square
*Mary will be organizing some pop-ups with Caroline of Love Rose Lingerie in late September/early October to coincide with Breast Cancer Awareness Month. More information from mary@emerje.co.uk.
