As her husband unveiled 24 perfectly wrapped presents beneath a towering Christmas tree in the living room of their sprawling Oxfordshire mansion, influencer Leonora Smee squealed with excitement.
‘I have a very special advent calendar for you,’ he told her, gesturing towards the heaps of gifts. ‘You have one present for every day until Christmas.’
‘How on earth have I not seen this?’ Leonora replied, acting totally surprised.
She proceeded to unwrap present number one: a £695 Aspinal handbag and a £150 silk scarf. ‘This is insane!’ she exclaimed. ‘I can’t believe we are going to do this every day.’
The video has now been viewed nearly nine million times, catapulting Leonora – previously a niche luxury influencer – into the upper echelons of ‘Richtok’.
What looks like a wildly romantic gesture has, in reality, become one of the most successful luxury influencer campaigns of the year.
And, as it turns out, very little about it was accidental.
Leonora, 30, describes herself on Instagram as offering her nearly 300,000 followers ‘luxury lifestyle in the English countryside… effortless elegance meets heritage’. She is also a former international showjumper and, after suffering an injury, founded Luxury by Leonora – a brand consultancy tailored towards high-end firms. In other words, she knows exactly how aspiration works, and how to sell it.
Leonora Smee sits beside her Christmas tree flanked by a mountain of presents with her husband Mark Cosgrove-Smith
Sources tell me that at one point, television executives were even mooting the idea of a reality show based on her life. It never materialised – but perhaps the renewed attention on Leonora, thanks to her advent calendar, might change that.
However, I can reveal that, far from being her husband Mark Cosgrove-Smith’s doing, the whole idea was orchestrated by Leonora’s team of two social-media savvy women, Anna and Anoushka. They film, edit and plan all of her social media content and brainstormed the concept as early as last year after spotting a similar series going viral.
‘We saw something like this on TikTok by a creator called Isobel Lorna, who Leonora adores,’ one of them claimed in a video posted to Leonora’s YouTube channel in November. The influencer had said she was going to take a ‘night off’ while Anna and Anoushka took over the 37-minute ‘vlog’, in which they revealed they had ordered all the advent calendar presents, then showed themselves wrapping the gifts.
By day three of last year’s advent calendar series, Isobel, then relatively unknown, had gained 30,000 followers. Her gift on Christmas Eve was a £3,000 Van Cleef necklace and, on Christmas Day, she got a Porsche, which came with a boot-full of gifts. She claimed her boyfriend had bought them for her – but he remains a mystery to her now 540,000-strong following.
‘The idea was to turn [the concept] into a daily series for Leonora,’ said her social media team.
Indeed, every day this month, the gifts have kept coming. So far, on top of the Aspinal handbag and scarf, there have been Louboutin heels (£695), Agent Provocateur lingerie (£500), Eve Lom skincare (£300), a Nadine Merabi dress (£395), Cornelia James gloves (£195), a Paloma diamond necklace (£2,000), Hermes accessories, and even a weekend in Paris, with a stay at the Mandarin Oriental (£2,000).
At the time of writing, on day 17, the total cost of the gifts tops £10,000.
Viewers could certainly be forgiven for thinking that her husband bought and wrapped all of them himself.
‘Please God let a love find me like this,’ said one commenter, while another wrote: ‘I love watching rich-people videos.’
All of which has seen Leonora’s fanbase soar to 109,000. It’s now thought that for each video (which are about two minutes long) Leonora will be earning at least £300. And with a week to go until Christmas, there is still plenty of time to raise the stakes.
But one thing is for sure: every morning, when Leonora opens her gift, she will put on the same surprised act.
Her background reads like a blueprint for modern British privilege. She was born into wealth and raised partly in the United States, spending her early childhood in a gated community in Lake Nona, Florida – an area known for its sprawling homes and manicured lawns.
When she was six, her family moved back to the UK, settling near Henley-on-Thames.
At 14, Leonora was sent to the Netherlands to train at the prestigious Eric van der Vleuten stables. ‘I was chucked in at the deep end,’ she said.
By 20, and with her showjumping career taking off, she had moved to Belgium, spending two years outside Brussels, before relocating to Germany for another three.
Ms Smee’s festive gift series has seen her Instagram presence soar to 109,000 followers – and rapidly counting
‘I had the most incredible upbringing. I was a horrific child. From the age of two until 11, I was so naughty. I would throw clothes out of windows and run away at theme parks. I’d jump on to the chandelier and hang from it.’
The family employed maids and household staff and Leonora was educated at St George’s School, Ascot, where fees can reach £18,000 per term. She is also a classically trained opera singer, a detail that sits neatly alongside the cultivated, old-money aesthetic she now projects online.
Leonora met Mark, now 42, at a horse show in England when she was aged just 16.
‘I thought: “Who is that old man?”‘ she has joked.
Mark, from Glasgow, said he was struck by Leonora’s beauty but backed off when he realised her age. They met again two years later in St Tropez, again at a horse show, where Mark – who made his fortune in asset management – was working for a mutual friend.
‘He whisked me off my feet,’ Leonora said. ‘I was going on the summer tour and he came with me. We had this 12-week tour together and fell head over heels in love.’
They have been inseparable ever since, marrying in August 2021. Mark now runs Smith Equestrian Ltd, remaining firmly rooted in the elite horse world that brought them together.
Leonora’s early career centred heavily on competitive show jumping and she won top spot in the 2017 Monaco Grand Prix.
But a serious riding accident changed everything.
‘The horse hit a pole and rotated,’ she explained. ‘She came down on top of me. I shattered my collarbone and ruptured everything from my neck through to my shoulder.’
Unable to continue riding at the same level, Leonora returned to the UK. Watching others compete on her horses from the sidelines proved too painful, though, so she decided to use high-net-worth contacts whom she had met through riding and her family and pivoted into the luxury sector.
She began organising events for Cartier before realising she would be better off working for herself, and set up her own consultancy.
Today, as well as being a full-time influencer, she works as a social media marketer and brand ambassador. Her client list includes Rolls-Royce, Cartier and Jo Malone.
Leonora and Mark live in a farmhouse on her family-owned estate near Henley-on-Thames, part of a wider portfolio that includes estates in both Britain and Majorca.
The Henley estate, Crazies Hall, is reportedly worth £20million and set across 80 acres with ten bedrooms, ten bathrooms and five reception rooms. In Majorca, the family owns a grand manor house with eight acres of landscaped gardens. Leonora’s social media also shows the family regularly flying by private jet, including a lavish trip to a South African safari earlier this year.
‘Children are on the cards,’ she has said, ‘but we’re so busy and we have a lot that we want to achieve first.’
Ms Smee made her name in showjumping and won top spot in the 2017 Monaco Grand Prix
Leonora’s father, Roger Smee, 77, is a property tycoon and was awarded an MBE in 2013 for his work with young people in Berkshire. He has seven businesses under his name and a long history in both property and sport.
A former Reading FC player in the late 1960s, Roger later became chairman of the club and famously blocked Robert Maxwell’s attempt to merge Reading with Oxford United.
He stepped down in 1990 to focus on his property empire, which has since expanded internationally, including the development of Pacific India, a major shopping mall in Delhi.
Roger also attempted to buy Reading Football Club this year in a reported £25million deal that was ultimately rejected.
Leonora has even admitted that her father supports her ‘almost too much’.
Her brother, Cameron, is in finance while her mother, Karen, is now building a modest Instagram following of her own, describing her content as ‘luxury lifestyle in the country’.
She appears frequently in Leonora’s videos, including one advent calendar episode in which she presents her daughter with a symbolic ‘bag of coal’, recalling Leonora’s childhood misbehaviour.
And Leonora, for her part, played the astonished ingenue to perfection.
‘We cannot believe how many people have seen our video,’ she said on day two. ‘Thank you for all your love and support. I am beyond shocked.’
In many ways, Leonora is the perfect symbol of a new wave of British influencers: old money aesthetics with a deep understanding of how to monetise aspiration.
Her advent calendar is not just a festive gimmick. It’s a masterclass in personal branding, a carefully curated fantasy that invites viewers to peer inside a world of inherited wealth, private jets and perfectly wrapped indulgence.
Whether her followers see it as harmless escapism or a boastful flex depends largely on where they’re watching from.
Either way, it appears Leonora Smee has done exactly what she set out to do.
