Meet the NI woman whose career went from working in Formula One to owning her own fashion brand

Speaking to Weekend from Portugal, Rae – whose eponymous brand was founded in 2013 and became a favourite of designer fashion publications, with its initialled straw handbags becoming the ‘It’ bag – has just celebrated the official opening of the fashion and lifestyle brand’s first Dublin store in The Westbury Mall.

Although the fashion designer hails from a prominent Cookstown family known for an eye for details and aesethetics (Rae’s sister, Helen Turkington, is an established interiors designer in Dublin and their parents, Raymond and Hilary Turkington, set up the well-known Cookstown business Raymond Turkington Decorations), she actually began her professional life working in Formula One for the McLaren team. Feather left work to focus on family when her now grown-up son took ill.

“I worked in sports marketing, mostly Formula One, ever since I was kind of 20 years old. It was purely by fate that I fell across this job. I ended up working for the McLaren, Benetton and Ferrari teams up until probably I was about 40,” explains Rae, who is approaching her 60th birthday.

“And then in the meantime, I got married and I had kids. And I just got to the point when I couldn’t travel anymore with my children. I had one child that got quite sick and I left work almost on the spot.”

Rae then contemplated her next career move, and the answer lay within her own family: Rae Feather, the brand, was born.

“I always was interested in what [my family] did… I grew up surrounded by textiles and colours. I decided to start my own brand, and I wanted to do something around lifestyle and not fashion, because I wasn’t a trained fashion designer. My translation of that – how I saw it – was really good fabric, classic shapes and affordability – it had to be affordable.

“I felt that there was a disparity between buying High Street and good quality and there was a bit in the middle.

“I’ve since learnt that being in that middle is not necessarily the best place to be to encourage buyers to buy you, if you’re not in that more expensive price point.

“I stuck with it and did it myself and got an agent and I was making everything myself. I was selecting my own fabrics and I was sticking to shapes that I knew were good, classic shapes. I took away the middle man, so to speak, and it was going straight from the factory to the customer almost. We didn’t over-order, and it gave me 100% control over the quality of products going out.

“I made a gazillion mistakes when we first started. We trusted a lot of people that I thought knew more than me – and they did – but on the other hand it cost me a lot of money and I ended up with huge stock levels I didn’t need.”

Rae continues: “We launched in 2013, and e-commerce at the time… it wasn’t nearly as prolific as it is now. I had the crazy idea that I was going to push a button and the world was going to come to my side, and it so wasn’t true. So we found ourselves with really high stock levels and financially in a mess. We then started a basket, a monogram basket, and the world went crazy for it and the fashion crowd went crazy for it. We took something that had been around for centuries that was raw, and we were making it en vogue.

“They were all hand-painted, and from a sustainable brand growth point of view it was just not possible. Every magazine around the world featured this bag, and we relaunched the basket and all the luxury brands launched their own versions. It took us a couple of years to streamline, by which time they were all doing their own versions. So we had to reinvent ourselves again, and about four years ago we started doing what we’re doing now.”

The brand’s ethos is all about comfortability, classic silhouettes, and stylish fashion for bodies of all shapes and sizes, the fashion owner insists.

“How does a 60-year-old woman dress? How does a 30-year-old woman dress? How does a 20-year-old woman dress? There are things that everyone has with their own personal style. If an 80-year-old woman wants to wear a short mini skirt, then go for it, and if a 20-year-old wants to wear some classic little black dress, you go for it.

“For me, I felt that I’ve dressed the same way since I was 20 – I’ve always dressed for comfort. I’ve always worn a white shirt, blue jeans and camel chinos. Then you can dress it up with some accessories.

“Trying on a pair of jeans… and that dread of trying it on, after having a child, or someone who might be a different shape to someone else. We’ve all experienced that dread and self-loathing and there shouldn’t be a place for it. So I don’t often do things that are fitted. I do have elasticated waists so it gives people an extra maybe three, four inches. Making dresses that are loose, but supplying belts for anyone who wants a more fitted look.

“I want the brand to come across as embracing the customer and encouraging them to buy it, and have it in their wardrobe for a long time.”

Reluctant to open a physical store in London’s retail hotspots, in spite of great responses to pop-ups, Rae says it was making trips back home that led to her brand’s Dublin store. “I decided not to open a store in London’s King’s Road or Marylebone. I had always felt that I was not experienced enough, it was a lot of investment, so many things where my gut didn’t go too far. I’d not lived in Ireland since I was 18, I was coming back and forth more and more, and having left Cookstown I thought I wouldn’t come back again, but I was loving being back home and buying Irish brands. My mum and I would go up to Donegal, by which time I had separated and got divorced, and my boys had grown up now and I just felt that I always being drawn back.”

She was asked if she would be interested in opening up a pop-up in Dublin’s Westbury, by “which time we had built up an Irish following and we had all these lovely Irish women come into the store, and the reaction has been incredible”.

“There’s a reason that Ireland has the reputation that it has: it’s known for its warmth, its hospitality and the craic. If you look at Ireland and how industrious it is, how creative it is – our nature. I’m painting a rosy picture here, but for someone who left and has come back, it’s incredible. I have a real mix of customers – I have housewives, teachers, lawyers, the mix is unbelievable – but at the heart of it, they see an approachable brand. I’m often on the shop floor and each customer is treated the same.

“We’re planning to do a pop-up in Belfast in the coming months… quite a lot of northern customers come into the shop as well. We moved our distribution to Northern Ireland because of the trade deal; we can trade with Europe.”

In an age when consumerism had broadly gone online, Rae believes there has been a noticeable shift back to in-person shopping post-Covid, as well as a move towards smaller fashion brands. “And founders at the forefront of the brand – and I’ve always done that, but I’ve never put my lifestyle on display. There’s ways of doing that. I do all my social media myself, I answer all the DMs personally. It allows people to get answers instantly. I think today it’s really tricky – every day’s a different day.

“After Covid it was not pretty, fashion – so much competition and product out there. We ordered small batches. It was just so flat, dark, and people were not happy shopping.”

But having a store in Ireland has meant that Rae is part of a cohort of talented fashion creatives on this side of the Irish Sea, and she waxes lyrical about our talent, including the figure who grew up not far from her Cookstown home: “JW Anderson is a genius. I love his way – he’s never forgotten his heritage. It’s about his passion; he’s very private. He doesn’t shout about himself too much. He does what he does and he does it very well.

“You can tell the man’s a genius. He comes back home a lot from what I gather. I actually met his mother at a party on Saturday night and she’s a really lovely woman; he actually didn’t live too far from us in Dungannon and his parents would have known my parents. And then there’s Louise Kennedy, who’s brilliant, and there’s loads of people coming up as well… Amy Anderson. I keep an eye on Amy all the time. She’s passionate about what she does.”

Rae’s also passionate about what her customers think, saying: “When someone tells me, ‘I bought a shirt from you three years ago and I still wear it,’ that’s the biggest compliment to me.”