When the British influencer Sarah Ashcroft started her womenswear label SLA in 2019, she didn’t anticipate it would be making nearly £5 million a year in revenue by early 2024. ‘Every piece on the website would sell out in hours,’ she says after her YOU magazine photoshoot. ‘On occasion I had to shut the website because we couldn’t get orders out quick enough.’
Ashcroft, 31, grew up in Buckinghamshire where she set up a fashion blog in 2013 before moving to London aged 18. She built her dedicated fanbase of 1.2 million Instagram followers, 5.7 million likes on TikTok and 271,000 YouTube subscribers by documenting her relationship with boyfriend Joe Ellyatt, and what she was wearing.
But while everything looked rosy, behind the scenes Ashcroft’s business was going bankrupt. She made a profit quickly, yet lost it just as fast: ‘I didn’t foresee losing my business, workforce and money, just 12 months after our biggest sales period. It was heartbreaking putting SLA into liquidation in February this year,’ she says.
We are living in an era where social media is everyone’s shop window, and the business of full-time content creation is thriving. Last year, Forbes reported the global influencer industry is worth approximately $250 billion (£185 billion) and investment bank Goldman Sachs predicts this figure will double by 2027.
Top, Laura Pitharas. Vest, Intimissimi. Earrings, Aymer Maria
Ashcroft and her fellow creators have been able to cash in and expand their revenue through advertisements, brand deals and sponsorships – as well as launching their own companies – because they possess one valuable business attribute: a captive audience. A recent Digital Marketing Institute survey found that 60 per cent of consumers trust influencer recommendations, with over half of all purchasing decisions encouraged by these endorsements.
Ashcroft knew exactly what her followers wanted to buy, because she had cultivated them since starting her blog, That Pommie Girl. After completing a fashion retail diploma, she had wanted to get into PR. ‘During job interviews they asked, “Do you have a blog?” I thought, “What’s a blog?” I started mine just to say I had one.’
Within six months, alongside her growing social-media following, Ashcroft’s daily outfit posts, featuring shoppable affiliate links, started making her real money. ‘I was only 19. To see £1,500 of commission hit my account monthly was wild. I had worked at Monsoon and Accessorize and didn’t make anywhere near that.’
Her selling power gained her the first of many brand collaborations with the fast-fashion websites Missguided and In The Style, where her curated clothing collections were a hit with customers. This inspired her to start her own brand, trademarked by her initials. ‘I was earning a lot on just 20 per cent commission and I wondered what it would be like to get 100 per cent of it. Naively I believed running my own business would be as simple as doing collaborations,’ she says.
Aged 26, with no business qualifications, co-founder or experience, and with £18,000 of her own money, Ashcroft placed the first SLA order of aeroplane outfits – ie tracksuits – with a Chinese manufacturer that emailed after seeing her social media call-out for factory recommendations in May 2019. In the beginning it was a success.
‘SLA was only seven months old when Covid hit. Everybody was buying joggers and sales rocketed. Nobody wants to say they profited from that horrendous time, but people were spending their excess cash on treats. Post lockdown everyone wanted to dress up, so we leaned into sparkly partywear instead, which sold even better.’
SLA’s sparkly Paloma suit was a bestseller
By 2021, Ashcroft had one employee, in a shared workspace office in Ladbroke Grove, West London. As life opened again, she had an instinct for what her followers wanted next: glitter blazers, minidresses and rhinestone-embellished co-ords became her signature.
In a saturated clothing market, brands will strategically attempt to break the internet with click-bait products – see Kim Kardashian’s Skims Seamless Sculpt Face Wrap, marketed to ‘shape’ your jawline as you sleep. Ashcroft didn’t have to invent crazy items to cause a stir online, yet going viral became her downfall. Rather than being a one-hit wonder, her designs repeatedly sold out for almost five years. SLA sold 60,412 units of her popular Paloma glitter suit (£155) in just a few weeks after its launch. She once sold 11,346 units of the Thea blazer (£85) in a day.
This created a risky peak and pit pattern to sales figures. ‘Selling out once is fine. But back-to-back, it doesn’t work. It took ten weeks to restock, which is not what you want for cash flow or a healthy business model with steady growth. We lived on a cash injection at the drop of stock, but then we’d have nothing on the website for weeks,’ she says. ‘I should have found investment early on because I didn’t have the experience or knowledge to scale it properly.’
In its first year, SLA made £450,000, then saw year-on-year growth: in year two it was £980,000; in year three almost £3 million; while year four was the biggest, with the brand clocking up £850,000 over one Black Friday weekend in November 2023, helping it make almost £5 million.
But in its fifth year it all went wrong. At the start of 2024, a major manufacturing issue in a hefty £450,000 restock of Ashcroft’s bestsellers led to the brand’s demise.
‘It was crazy to me how quickly it all went wrong, because up until then we had been successful. We used our regular Chinese manufacturer, so I put the stock on the website without checking when it arrived in the UK warehouse. That was my first mistake. Rule number one: always check your stock,’ she says, chopping one hand on the palm of the other.
The fit and quality of the collection was badly off. The brand’s popular oversized sparkly Paloma blazer (£95) was 5cm bigger than the agreed pattern across the chest and shoulders. ‘They looked ridiculous. And the glitter in this batch was covering sofas and car seats. Customers were understandably complaining.’
Sarah in a dress from her 2017 In The Style collab
Ashcroft knew the fabrics were inferior even though the factory denied using alternatives. ‘I even had the material tested in a lab and it was 30 grams lighter than the one I approved. They had lied.’
She took all faulty stock offline, refunded disgruntled customers and for three months her website had nothing on it because she lacked the funds to buy more stock to sell.
As this nightmare unfolded, Ashcroft’s heavily documented eight-year relationship with Ellyatt ended. ‘Headspace-wise I was struggling. It ended suddenly and I lost the person I’d turn to with all of my problems. I was also dealing with the business failing. I felt entirely alone.’
The bad news kept on coming. ‘People were chasing us for money. One creditor threatened, “You need to pay us the 50 grand you owe within two weeks or we’re coming for you.”’ SLA limped on until February 2025, when Ashcroft announced the closure to her followers.
‘I didn’t have a choice. I felt like a massive failure. I was in a terribly dark place mentally. My mum stayed at my house overnight for a month to check on me. I felt drained. But when you liquidate, you have to step away. It was all in the hands of the lawyers, which in a way was freeing.’
Even though Ashcroft thought she had legal grounds to sue the suppliers, it didn’t matter. ‘It is notoriously tricky to sue Chinese manufacturers. We didn’t have a solid contract with them, which highlighted the naivety of me running a big business.
‘I hated that there were customers caught up in it and we owed refunds we couldn’t pay. And there was my workforce – six of us in the end and it sounds clichéd, but we became a family,’ she says in tears. ‘For three months at the end I funded payroll out of my own bank account, because I desperately wanted to make sure they could afford their rent. It was horrible to lose them.’
She is now rebuilding her life. ‘The old me is dead. This process has changed me beyond words.’ Today her millions of followers remain gripped. She then reveals she’s recently been employed as the new chief design director of Oh Polly, another UK fast-fashion partywear brand, which has 6.5 million Instagram followers.
‘When I announced the liquidation of SLA, I received a lot of hate, but I also had people asking to hire me. This isn’t another influencer collection; it’s a real full-time job. For once I feel very grown up,’ she says.
Ashcroft’s experience of reaching the top and falling back down is a cautionary tale for Instagram-made businesses. Yet while she has lost her entrepreneurial appetite, her social following hasn’t lost its enthusiasm for her. Algorithms and her new job will potentially restore her millions; the question is whether it can restore her nerve.
Stylist: Hope Palmer.
Hair: Jay Pinder.
Make-up: Katie Daisy.
